


The Monster in the Dark

by Nemo_the_Everbeing



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Dreams, Gen, debatable shipping, mental landscapes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-09
Updated: 2010-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:38:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 44,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemo_the_Everbeing/pseuds/Nemo_the_Everbeing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things must be dealt with, and Ace put off dealing with the cheetah virus until it was almost too late.  The Doctor must enlist some unconventional and unwanted help to pull her through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Shadow in the Halls

**Author's Note:**

> Without the following people, places and things, this story would not have been possible. In no particular order, I'd like to thank: Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, the Dustbowl, Roger Delgado, bumper-nose crabs, Anthony Ainley, Scum Beach, Greek mythology, Joss Whedon, and the entire country of Jordan. Oh, and an extra-special shout-out to my phenomenal beta, Zircon. Thanks!

In her dreams, Ace chased a great cat through the halls of the TARDIS.  It glided through the dim corridors, its loping paws making no sound as they connected with the floor.  She saw it in the distance and around corners: golden eyes flashing from a tawny face. 

 

Weren’t TARDISes supposed to guard against giant cats?

 

She followed the cat.  If she could catch it, she thought she’d be able to figure out why it was there in the first place.  She followed the cat, although her plan on what happened after capture wasn’t as clear as she would have liked.  You couldn’t really interrogate a cat.  A cat was the kind of creature which would never give up its secrets.  Sort of like the Doctor in that respect, was the cat.

 

In every dream, she would nearly catch the cat.  She would turn a corner and there it would be, sitting on its haunches waiting for her.  She would backpedal and it would stare, and she’d know that it had already won.

 

And then she would wake up with the pain of elongated teeth and the shock of heightened senses.  At those moments, in the dark of her room, she felt infinitely connected to the present and the world around her.  She could see every imperfection in the smooth ceiling and hear the heartbeat of the TARDIS coming from so very far away.  She could taste the tang of invented air.  She could feel the tingle of minute adjustments in the spatial parameters of the ship shiver across her skin.  And she could smell the Doctor.  No matter how far away he was, or what he was doing, she could smell him: old books, ozone, confectionary, and the barest sigh of an alien breeze carrying spice and honey-sweet flowers.

 

She would rise, clad only in her T-shirt and underwear, and she would pad out of the room.  Every footfall was deliberate: first her toes silenced the impact, and then the heel settled with fluid deliberation.  Her feet wove delicately, one in front of the other.  A perfect line of attack.

 

She would wander the halls, not sure who she was pursuing or if she was pursuing anyone at all.  Perhaps she was hunting shadows, but the drive within her told her to chase, and so she did.

 

She caught glimpses of the great cat out of the corners of her eyes, flashing through the gloom of parallel corridors.  It happened every time, each the same.  She knew she wasn’t dreaming—she felt a dizzy rush of disbelief that this thing existed in the real world as well as her head—but she couldn’t let surprise or doubt deter her.  She would spring into action, and her feet would slap the deck like thunderclaps as she flew after it.  Her teeth would flash and her eyes would grow even more feral and she would hunt in earnest, running down the beast which dared violate her territory and threaten her Doctor. 

 

She knew something was wrong with her.  She had no doubt it was the cheetah virus.  The Doctor had said she would deal with it for the rest of her life.  She just hadn’t imagined that dealing with it would be such an immediate affair.  The logical thing, of course, would be to tell the Doctor that they were experiencing some sort of giant cat infestation.  It was the kind of thing the Doctor would want to look into.  She never told, though.  Dream after dream, night after night, and she never breathed a word.  She couldn’t.  The great cat was for her alone, and the Doctor wouldn’t understand.  He wouldn’t be able to help, and he might even be hurt.  Better to hunt the cat on her own.  Track it down and pin it in a corner.  Fight it.  She wondered what the statistics were on a nineteen-year-old girl versus a giant cat.

 

She would chase throughout the night, and the next morning she would awaken in some strange room dressed only in her T-shirt and underpants.  She would pull herself to her feet, tug the hem of her T-shirt down, and sneak back to her room, ghosts of the previous night flitting in her wake.

 

She told herself that it was nothing she couldn’t handle.  Ace McShane wasn’t scared of anything, let alone some great imaginary cat in the dark.  It was just her fears and worries finding form.  It was her mind trying to cope with the disease by giving it solidity.  She would get this out of her system.  She would calm down.  Things would go back to normal.  She would just be Ace, and she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night as something else.  Something with the inescapable need to hunt and kill the great cat.  The cat, which, in the end, would always be sitting around the bend waiting for her.  The cat which stared at her and knew her.  Knew every inch of her.

 

She wondered if the great cat _was_ her.

 

After months of this hell, she sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee at her elbow.  She was being worn thin by all this nocturnal dashing about and it was showing in her caffine intake.  She was surprised the Doctor hadn’t noticed, but then, they’d been busy.  He was finally getting around to doing some repairs he’d been meaning to catch up on for the past two centuries.  He’d torn apart several walls, had pried off multiple face-covers from the main console, and he would frequently vanish so far into the bowels and underpinnings of the TARDIS that even Ace didn’t know where to start looking. 

 

She’d tried to get him to teach her what he was doing so she could help with the upkeep.  She thought it might be nice to be able to look after the ship for him so that he didn’t have to do all the repairs in one it’s-necessary-or-we-could-implode/explode/deplode-or-any-other-kind-of-‘plode-you-might-happen-to-think-of blitz.  He’d also seemed rather keen on the idea. 

 

So she’d sat down next to him at the console.  She’d handed him tools and listened to him lecture on the finer points of TARDIS repair, but her mind had begun to wander.  She’d seen glowing amber eyes through the door to the rest of the ship, and she’d stared back at them for minutes at a time, leaving important gaps in her education.  She’d been too ashamed to ask the Doctor to repeat himself. 

 

After a while she began to beg off the sessions, and she thought she’d seen a flash of disappointment in his eyes.  She’d said she had to digest what she’d already picked up and he’d accepted the answer, so it wasn’t as though he thought she wasn’t interested.  Maybe he just liked the company.

 

Now, instead of working with the Doctor, she sat alone in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a desperate desire to just have it over.  She wanted the virus gone.  She wanted to be able to sleep through a night or learn something useful without her own subconscious having to step in and do a little tap-dance.  If she’d had the energy, she might have smirked at the image in her mind of the great cat wearing tap-shoes, springing up from its seated elegance to do its very best Fred Astaire impression.  She was too tired though, so she sipped at the coffee and willed herself back to life.

 

Perhaps a plate of waffles was in order.  She’d been off her feed for a few days and she needed to get back to it.  Proper nutrition was just the thing for sick bodies.  Ace dragged herself to her feet and shuffled to the food dispenser.  She stared at the controls in bleary incomprehension for several seconds, then shook herself out of her reverie and punched up a plate of waffles, extra syrup.

 

A bright yellow cube came flying out of the dispenser and smacked her between the eyes.

 

Before she could properly formulate a response to the utter randomness of the occurrence, another cube hit her.  Then another.  The next thing she knew, she was being pelted with a shower of yellow cubes.  She batted at them to no avail. 

 

“Doctor!” she bellowed.  It had to be his fault.  He was the one mucking about in the TARDIS’ innards day-in-day-out, and she had no great belief in his ability to command the machine.  He’d probably crossed some wires or he’d torn the food machine apart and never bothered to put it back together.  Leave it to Ace to clean up the mess. 

 

She waded through the cubes—which were now almost a foot deep about her feet—held one hand out before her and aimed for the emergency shutdown button.  Everything on the TARDIS, she thought, should have an emergency shutdown button.  One thing she’d learned from three years in the dimensionally transcendental police box was that anything on the ship could and would do something insane like spit yellow cubes when she least expected it.  Especially with the Doctor’s current maintenance schedule of ‘I’ll fix it when it’s broken.’

 

She snarled, lunged forward and slapped the button hard enough that she cracked its smooth face.  The long, thin fissure in the material caught on her hand and tore her palm.  The scent of blood hit the air and she stood, panting, as the deluge ceased.  Each inhale dragged a growl from her.

 

The realization that she’d changed—that she’d turned into what she was beginning to refer to as her ‘crazy, yellow-eyed catgirl’ persona and she hadn’t even realized—didn’t horrify her.  She was still too angry and too on edge to respond as she should.  She smelled the blood in the air and felt each cube brush against her legs.  The growls rumbling her chest felt like she was finally releasing a tension which had built for weeks.  She was powerful.  She was in control.  She faced a situation and she solved it.  Her life was boiled down to its simplest possible form and she found she liked it that way.

 

After several moments of standing and reveling in her state she began to calm, and the worry began to seep in around the edges of her euphoria.  She wasn’t changing back.  Her teeth remained sharp, and her senses were still hyper-acute.  She stared at the cracked button on the food dispenser and the nausea of fear swept through her.  If she couldn’t control herself over something as trivial as a malfunctioning food machine, she was in trouble.  She could do horrible damage and she’d never notice.  No, scratch that, she’d notice.  She just wouldn’t care. 

 

And what if the next time it wasn’t a button in her way?  What if it was—

 

“Oh, dear!” the object of her fears said from the door. 

 

Ace had her back turned to keep her face hidden, but she knew it was the Doctor.  She would have known even if he was unmoving and didn’t speak.  She could smell him, hear his double-heartbeat rushing in her ears.  She drew a ragged breath.  She’d never been so close to a real person in such a small space in this state, and his presence was almost overwhelming.  His scent had nowhere to go, so it filled the room.  It was packed so tightly it blocked out all other scents. 

 

He bustled over to the food machine, not commenting on her lack of response, and pulled the facing off to reveal an intricate tangle of wires and feeds.  He followed two at once with his fingers.  Ace peeked over her shoulder to watch. 

 

He asked, “Tell me what happened.  Was this in response to a particular command, or just out of the blue?”  She still said nothing, because as soon as she spoke he would know.  Her voice got obscured by the fangs. 

 

He was expecting a response, though, and when he didn’t get one he turned.  Ace made to whirl away, to look busy cleaning up the cubes or something, but she had been caught unawares.  Even her heightened instincts didn’t allow her to turn quite fast enough.

 

The Doctor straightened, and his attention was completely diverted from the malfunctioning food dispenser.  “Ace?” he asked, his eyes never leaving hers.  She could see every fleck of blue and gray in his irises, could define every hair on his head. 

 

She swallowed hard and glanced away, reeling from sensory overload and the palpable presence he created in the room.  “Just . . . just give me a second,” she whispered.

 

“Has this happened before?” he asked.  Damn him!  Didn’t he understand what ‘give me a second’ meant?

 

“No,” she snarled, and they both knew it was a lie. 

 

She didn’t need his help, though!  Anything he did at that moment was just going to make things worse, because to do anything he would have to come closer, and when he did that—and there he went, stepping towards her like the idiot he was.  All she could smell was his blood, and all she could hear were his pulses, and who really needed waffles when there was something so deliciously trusting just standing there?

 

She had him by the lapels and slammed up against the food machine before he could react.  He let out a startled whoosh of breath, and his hands came up, but he didn’t try to push her away.  Why was he not fighting?  Even the weakest prey fought to keep their own lives.  Why did he offer himself up to death? 

 

She leaned in, willing her prey to understand, to fight.  Such unresisting sacrifice made the kill unappealing.  She grazed her teeth over the jugular, and he whispered, “Ace?”

 

Ace?  What was he talking about?

 

“I could tear your throat out right now,” she said, wanting the struggle more than she wanted the kill.  She had been spoiling for a fight all four months since the cheetah planet.  “Do you know that?”

 

“Yes,” he said, and she could feel the vibrations of the word under her teeth.  There it was.  That was fear she heard.  She purred low in her throat, all approval.  If he was finally going to cooperate, she was more than willing draw things out a while, bat him about a bit.

 

“I could snap you like a dry twig,” she whispered.  He shuddered and she ran her tongue along the vein, collecting her very first real taste of her prey.  Such ancient blood, she thought.  Did he have any clue how attractive that was?  “Would you fight?” she asked, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it from him.  She wanted that fear again.

 

“No.”

 

“You should.”  She adjusted her grip, smoothing her hands from his lapels to his shoulders and then shoving hard.  There was a dull thump as he was forced ramrod straight against the wall.

 

 “Ace,” he said again.

 

What was he on about, anyhow?  Who was this—

 

Ace.

 

She was Ace.

 

She jerked away, gasping as the veil of predatory intent fell and everything came back into focus.  She had almost hurt the Doctor.  She had almost killed the Doctor.  She’d shoved the Doctor against a wall, threatened him, and . . . Gordon Bennet, what she’d done to him.

 

He stepped forward, but she was already running.  He called after her, “Ace!” but she was out into the hallway and sprinting away.  She had to get somewhere, had to find a solution.  It was one thing to lose sleep and have nightmares about great cats, but she wouldn’t allow herself to hurt him.

 

She staggered to a stop in the med-bay.  She wondered if the TARDIS had led her there with intent, or if it was just a happy accident.  The end result was the same either way: she knew what she had to do.  If the cheetah came out when she was angry or afraid, then she had to ensure that she wouldn’t feel either, and if the physical changes were basically to do with musculature and maybe a bit of brain chemistry, well, there was a fix for that too. 

 

Let it never be said that Ace McShane didn’t know how to plan.  After all, she’d sat at the feet of the king of master plans and she’d learned well.  It was all about calculated risks.  About weighing potential harm against potential benefit.  She did that in seconds, and her conclusions were simple.  They’d have frightened her at any other time, but she’d almost killed the Doctor.  All fear for herself had departed the second she’d done that.

 

She tore into the neatly-organized cupboards.  It wasn’t long until she found the two doses she was looking for.  She plugged the first into the delivery-gun and pressed it to her throat.  Then, taking a deep breath, she pulled the trigger. 

 

She felt the muscle-relaxants begin to kick in almost immediately.  She slumped against the exam table.  She kept her feet under her, but it was a struggle.  She had seconds to administer the next dose before she was rendered incapable of doing so.  With limp fingers barely able to grip let alone maneuver, she loaded the second dose into the delivery-gun.  She shot the dose home even as her arms felt dragged down by lead weights.

 

The massive dose of sedatives entered her system.  The world slewed.  She wondered if, perhaps, the doses weren’t measured out to human physiology.  That might be a problem.  Then again, they were doing what she needed them to do.  She wasn’t a threat to anyone in this condition.  Now, if only she could get the med-bay to stop tilting sideways . . .

 

Her knees buckled and Ace fell to the floor, lying there as her eyes fixed on the great cat standing in the doorway.  It _would_ come after her only when she was weak. 

 

“Come on, kitty,” she said, but the words came out thick and slurred.  “Come and get it.”

 

The cat leapt, growling, and slammed into her.

 


	2. Fearful Symmetry

It was a decent planet for a stopover, all things considered.  More than the usual, infinitely dull necessities (a breathable atmosphere, a tolerable level of ambient radiation, a suitable temperature and light in spectrums he could appreciate), the planet also possessed one attribute which made it particularly appealing to him at this time: no life in the common sense.  There was debate over whether or not the crystals were alive, but no conclusions had been reached by the scientific community at large. 

 

The silence was welcome.  He’d tried to get on with his life, get back to activities which once pleased him, but the situation remained a bit . . . off.  If he were to be honest with himself—something he was trying hard to do at that moment, sitting on a barren rock plain surrounded by crystals—he would have to admit that the situation had been off since he secured his new body. 

 

He’d had no choice, of course.  The only other option was death, and how could a man die when he had so much yet to do?  So many wishes and ambitions yet unfulfilled?  There was no rose-tinting in his life, no comfortable illusions.  He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that when he died there would be nothing.  All that he’d accomplished in his lifetimes, and then . . . nothing.  A great black void, and the universe would find itself facing a lack of him.  A lack of the things he could have done.

 

So he survived through the only means available to him.

 

Maybe he’d acted on fear, on the terror that all beings from the most primitive human up through the most sophisticated Time Lord still felt when they faced that void of nonexistence.  He, however, liked to think it was stubborn refusal to give in to an archaic restriction which drove him to survive even as his thirteenth body decayed and collapsed around him.  Then, the man from Traken (What was his name?  Did that even matter any more?  It wasn’t as though any part of him survived) had come along; conveniently enough, at about the same time as he discovered the ability to transfer consciousness.  It was providence!  Under that unsightly beard, hair, and clothing, there had been something about that body, something which seemed almost painfully familiar.  Something right.

 

He’d taken the body, rousting the consciousness which lived there and taking up residence in the abandoned shell.  He’d programmed his TARDIS with fingers which didn’t know the controls, and his single heart had pumped furiously.  His two lungs had inflated and deflated, and, as his TARDIS dematerialized into the vortex, he’d collapsed to the floor of his control room, feeling dizzy from the lack of blood-flow, weak from the deficient muscles, and suffocating for lack of air.  Everything about the body had fallen short of what he needed.  He’d been so sure he would die.  He’d waited for death to take him, for the void to catch up, laughing at his attempts to circumvent the inevitable. 

 

But he hadn’t died.  After hours lying on the floor, staring at roundeled walls, his breathing had begun to ease.  His heart had slowed.  He’d tottered to his feet, his muscles still horribly weak, and he’d realized that the body wasn’t dying.  This was what it was to be something less than a Time Lord.  He’d thought of the Doctor’s humans.  There was so much in common between the respective physiologies of Earth and Traken.  He had felt a deep and abiding disgust for beings living in squalid bodies such as this for their entire lives, never knowing the grandeur they lacked.

 

That had been before the virus.  Before he’d stopped off on a planet renowned for its strange inhabitants and seismic activity and had become infected.  He’d begun to change.  It had been wonderful.  It had been horrible.

 

And now he sat on a planet bathed in a hazy blue twilight, with a virus raging through him and his single, pathetic heart pounding in his ears, and he wondered if it was all really worth the effort.  Getting his feet back under him, so to speak, was a more arduous task than he’d thought.  He smelled the horrid tang of the sweat his new body produced and secreted rather more than he would prefer, tasted everything differently as his palate switched races, and he felt . . . mortal.  Diseased and mortal and so tired.

 

He growled low in his throat and stared at the ground, wrapping his cape more firmly about his shoulders.  The crystal formations of Cygnus-B III were purported to contain some of the most intricate patterns in the known universe.  Only the largest and most rudimentary had been thoroughly mapped and deciphered, their patterns recorded and reconstructed on a computer in a lab on some backwards planet which considered itself advanced.  As he sat amidst the crystals, he felt nothing but contempt for the so-called scientists of his universe.  The patterns, once seen, were ready enough to give up their secrets.  Beautiful mathematical precision spread out in every direction, numbers and equations repeated forever without end. 

 

He understood the appeal after his ordeal on the cheetah planet.  The disease was so unpredictable.  His senses were heightened, yes, but his genetic structure had been altered, perhaps his mind, as well.

 

That was the great fear: losing his mind.  A body could be obtained anywhere from anyone, no matter the cost, but there was only one mind like his in the universe, and if the virus was threatening damage to that, he would have to find himself a new body quickly.  He appreciated the aesthetics of this one, certainly, the vague resemblance it held to his thirteenth body, but it was just so much meat.  What he was had nothing to do with form and all to do with the ephemeral.

 

The virus did have potential benefits.  The idea that he could regain at least some of his former attributes—the strength and speed and keen senses of a true Time Lord—was intoxicating.  He could fight, although the idea was painfully plebeian, and he could also see, hear, smell, taste, and feel things he’d never been capable of since he’d transferred to this body.  The combined senses and his own staggering intellect left him with a sense of superiority mixed with dread.  The universe was his oyster, and the physical changes were a small price to pay.  His teeth had stopped hurting weeks ago after the change became permanent, and the eye-color, while it looked very strange, could be easily concealed.  No, he was not so vain that the appearance mattered to him.  What disturbed him, if he’d let himself admit it—and, frankly, he’d tried very hard not to—was that this change had taken him one step further away from what he was.  Everything that had happened since the decay of his thirteenth body had rendered him a Time Lord only in mind.  The approximations the virus had given him were only thrilling some of the time.  The rest of the time, he was only reminded of how far he had fallen, that this twisted, mutated shadow was the closest he could come to his former glory.

 

He shook his head.  The past was past, and even he wouldn’t transgress the laws of time to go back and change it.  It was far better to be alive, no matter his condition, than to face that final void.  He ran a finger along one of the crystal patterns, his gaze following the warm, white glow spreading along microscopic nodules.  Such amazing mathematical precision.  Yes, it was better to live.

 

He heard a wail in the distance.  He sighed, but didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge the sound of the door creaking open or the familiar scent of Gallifrey which wafted out from inside the craft. 

 

He didn’t look when he heard the soft tread approaching, crystals shattering under the feet of his adversary.  A final crunch heralded the not-unexpected arrival, smelling of tea and old books. 

 

He could hear the familiar double heartbeat and for a second the purest rush of hatred consumed him.  The Doctor stood there, so confident, so perfect.  His physiology was untainted: Gallifreyan in its entirety.  The Master told himself that he was not envious, that he was unique, and that gave him advantages of which the Doctor could never dream.  But to be a Time Lord . . . could he even claim to be the same Koschei who had once lived on Gallifrey, once plotted the greatest escape the planet had ever witnessed with his closest friend, his most trusted ally, the man he hated so much it made him shake when he let himself think too hard on it? 

 

He smothered every pang of longing he felt for that warm familiarity and that sense of belonging.  They were beneath him, and he was not one to dwell on that which couldn’t be changed.

 

When he had regained his calm, he said, “Hello, my dear Doctor.”  He still didn’t bother to turn.  He told himself he had no time for social graces.  He was quite caught up in his calculations, after all.  If the Doctor wished a confrontation, he would simply have to wait.

 

His reticence to look around had nothing to do with the shame that he couldn’t suppress the eyes, the fangs, the mutation. 

 

“I’m a bit surprised you’d come here,” the Doctor said.  ‘_Theta_,’ a little voice in the back of the Master’s mind whispered, as it always did.  Titles seemed so cumbersome, yet the distance was necessary.  Time, a difference in philosophy, and the fact that they’d both managed to do in at least one of their rival’s regenerations _made_ it necessary.  “Crystals and barren rock don’t seem your style.  Not unless you’ve devised some way to use sentient crystals to your benefit.”

 

The Master snorted.  How like the Doctor to assume such things.  Yes, he thought, it must be surprising to see the infinitely evil Master sitting on a rock contemplating crystals.  What a horrible thing to know that he wasn’t plotting to destroy Earth or take desperate measures to save his own life.  How terrible to know that sometimes he just needed to sit and think.  “Even madmen must find time to relax,” he said, allowing a good dose of irony to flavor his speech.  On any other day he probably would have come up with a dozen ways to kill the Doctor in this situation, but, as he’d noted previously, he was too busy with his calculations.

 

The Doctor hesitated.  Good.  The Master delighted in throwing him off-balance.  Then, maybe surprising them both, the Doctor dropped onto the rock next to him and stared at the crystals.

 

“I’ve heard that three-thousand years in the future these crystals will be regarded as the most rational life-forms in the known universe,” the Doctor said.  “They’ll revolutionize mathematical logic.”

 

The Master sniffed his derision.  “It takes three-thousand years to realize that?  The universe is pathetic.”

 

“They do their best.”

 

“As I said.”

 

They were silent for several more moments, and the Doctor leaned down to get a closer look at a particular geometric formation.  The golden ratio, the Master believed was the common name, dividing into itself for eternity.  

 

“There must be a smallest portion,” the Doctor muttered, “but I can’t make it out.”

 

The Master leaned in to study the problem, but even he couldn’t make out the smallest part, just that the divisions continued past his sight.  “It’s a mathematical paradox,” he said.

 

“Divide by the same fraction again and again, and it will never reach zero?”  The Doctor slid off the rock to crouch before the formation.  He pulled a magnifying glass from that ridiculous suit-jacket he’d taken to wearing in this body, and peered through it.  “Remarkable,” he breathed, rolling his r far more than was simply necessary.  “I’ve never seen an actual physical representation of a mathematical paradox.  I didn’t even know such a thing could exist outside the abstract.”

 

The Master was drawn in spite of himself and in spite of his aversion to the Doctor.  He crouched too, snatching the magnifying glass.  He was about to peer through it when the Doctor turned and looked at him for the first time.  The Master froze, realizing that in his mathematical zeal he’d forgotten his appearance.  He drew himself up, towering over the Doctor.

 

“Numbers are a comfort, aren’t they?” the Doctor asked.

 

The Master sneered, but couldn’t answer.  The Doctor, as so often happened, was right.  Numbers were comforting because they were absolute.  Mathematics had rules, and once the rules were known, the mathematical truths were immutable. 

 

“Is it contained?” the Doctor pressed.  He always insisted on pursuing the worst possible topic. 

 

The Master had planned on being civil.  After all, one should be polite in such a place.  Emotion was wrong for cold, perfect logic.  Emotion was there, though: anger, indignation, that horrible hint of fear. 

 

“You think I lack the will to defeat it?” the Master snarled.  He itched to pull the Doctor up by his tie, to hurl him across the ground.  But that would crush the crystals, and the Master couldn’t allow himself to give in to these primitive aggressive tendencies.  The virus had been defeated, yes, beaten back and down until it was bent to his will, but there had been such a price.  He would not brook the triumph or, worse, the pity he was bound to see in the dear Doctor’s eyes if he gave in. 

 

The Doctor’s expression didn’t flicker.  He stood and stared down his oldest enemy and even older friend.  “You weren’t quite fast enough, were you?” he asked, but there was no malice in his words.

 

The Master bared his sharp teeth.  “Fast enough, Doctor?  I defeated something which had never been defeated before.  I saved myself from that state of . . . feral insanity.  You certainly couldn’t do better.”

 

The Doctor stepped closer, eyes hooded with intent.  The Master cocked his head.  There was something different about this regeneration.  He’d noticed it the last time they’d met and it was even more apparent now.  All the other variations on the theme he’d seen since Theta left Gallifrey had been so very noble in their own way.  The tall, dapper incarnation with a passion for velvet and capes had earned the Master’s respect.  After all, there weren’t many who could bluff their way into convincing him to join forces.  He’d been a fool to trust the Doctor, but at least that incarnation was wily enough to use the momentary lapse to his advantage.

 

The next incarnation had been an enigma.  The Master had guessed that there was much more going on than met the eye with that one, but he’d never been able to get under that Doctor’s skin.  His own thirteenth body had been dying at the time, and he’d been a bit busy.  After he’d secured his new body, there was the initial period of disorientation which rendered his ability to fully study that version impossible.  And then it had gone and died, and yes, he’d helped that process along, but he had regretted the decision.  It wasn’t every day a man of his age encountered something unknown.

 

The regeneration after that had been a disappointment, to say the least.  After such an enigma, it was terrible to be confronted by a Doctor who was so . . . honest.  And good.  And noble.  And infinitely, awfully boring.  He hadn’t been sorry to see the back of that incarnation.

 

His experience with the garish one had been brief, but memorable.  A bit more interesting, that one, with his bluster and his grandiosity.  All of it a bluff, of course, and yet the Master still didn’t get the sense of enigma which had come so readily to the great Bohemian.

 

No, it wasn’t until this newest regeneration that he began to see the enigma return, compounded by something else, something new and thrilling: an utter lack of nobility.  That wasn’t to say that this new Doctor wasn’t sickeningly principled, and wouldn’t do everything he could to see that ‘good’ triumphed at the end of the day, but he wasn’t going to be a martyr to do it.  He’d achieve good by playing the devil himself, and that . . . that was delicious.

 

After nine-hundred years, his dear Theta had finally grown up.  He was ready to make the hard decisions, the decisions with no good solution, just an option for less bad.  After nine-hundred years, the Doctor might begin to understand the Master’s choices.

 

Or not.  It didn’t really matter in the end.  This regeneration would die, and maybe this novel moral ambiguity would fade along with the diminished stature and strange grey eyes. 

 

“You do know how to halt the disease,” the Doctor said, and the Master cursed himself for letting his attention wander.

 

“Why do you—” and realization dawned.  In that respect, at least, this Doctor was no different than any other.  This banal attachment to humans . . . “—is she dying?” the Master asked, a slow smile spreading over his face as the Doctor shifted in discomfort.  “Or is she changing?  What else would prompt this most unlikely of visits if not the peril of your pet human?”  He sat down again, taking pleasure in the upper hand.  Usually they were so evenly-matched that he never got the occasion to sit back and enjoy watching the Doctor squirm.

 

“That is irrelevant to the—”

 

“It’s completely relevant, Doctor.  It’s why you’re here, so swallow your pride and your obfuscation and tell me.”  He flashed his fangs in a grin.  “I can’t wait to hear.”

 

The Doctor gave him a brittle, cold look, but he was cornered and they both knew it.  “She’s losing control,” said the Doctor, his voice tight and his gaze shifting away from the Master and then back again.  How desperate he must be to display such foreign honesty.  “I must know what I’m facing so I can determine how to stop it.”

 

“Have you tried a collar and a dish of milk?” the Master asked, feeling a tingle of victory at the Doctor’s scowl.  “I’ve heard they answer marvelously in these feral breeds.”

 

“If she dies while you’re making flip remarks . . .”  Desperate indeed.  The Doctor never threatened.  He was far too noble for that.  Then again, this particular Doctor . . .

 

The Master rolled his eyes, interested in just how far he could push things.  “Oh, honestly, what do you expect?  You came here for my advice and here it is: drop her on a planet with a good deal of natural game and find yourself someone new.”  He flicked a bit of dust from his lapel.  “She’s a human.  If I ended up like this, just imagine what the battle will do to her.”

 

“I _am_ going to save her.”

 

“Ever the hero.”

 

“Oh, I do try,” the Doctor said.  And then he lunged forward, faster than one would expect.  The Master leapt up and caught him without effort, slightly amazed that the Doctor would resort to a physical assault. 

 

“You really are desperate, aren’t you?” the Master asked, stunned into a quiet moment.  The thought didn’t even cross his mind to snap the Doctor’s wrists for his foolishness.  He merely stood and watched eyes like diamond flashing up at him.  There was something raw there, beneath the civilization and the urbane manners the Doctor had long-since adopted.  The Master was drawn, despite himself.  It was why he always came back to the Doctor, always wanted one more go-round: at the end of the day there might only be one thing in the universe which could still surprise an ancient, renegade Time Lord, and that was one of his own.

 

They stood in a standoff, neither prepared to escalate at that moment.  Physically, the Master could not lose, but that vicious desperation in the Doctor’s eyes indicated that he wasn’t to be discounted.  They stared at one another, waiting for the single gesture which would determine the method of play.

 

“Yes,” the Doctor finally admitted after the silence snapped.  He stepped back and the Master let him do so, releasing his wrists.  “Yes, I’m desperate,” he whispered.  And then a smirk lit upon his face and the Master felt the situation take a sharp turn from his control.  “I’m also far more clever than you seem to think.”  He flicked his hands and curled off thin, skin-tight gloves.  Carefully turning them inside out, he said, “Look at your palms.”

 

The Master raised his hands to stare at the small, hair-like barbs which had sunk into his flesh.  Something purple oozed from their ends.  He noted with hazy detachment that the world beyond him was careening to one side.

 

The Doctor caught him before he hit the ground and crushed the crystals.  The Master had the ridiculous urge to thank him, but instead said, “You drugged me.”

 

“I did indeed.”

 

The Master raised his eyes, a smile on his lips.  “I’m impressed.  None of your former selves would be quite this underhanded.”  His smile widened as he closed for the kill.  “Tell me, Theta: how does it feel to be the Master?”

 

The Doctor wrenched away from him and the Master fell to the ground, hearing the splintering of a million tiny crystals.  All that mathematical precision . . .

 

The Doctor fell back several paces with an expression of disgust and concern on his face, though what that concern was for, the Master couldn’t say.  Perhaps he was concerned because there was a touch too much truth in the Master’s observations for his taste.  Theta had always wanted to be better than he really was. 

 

Then the concern and even the disgust cleared away, leaving the Doctor blank and chill.  He turned one glove back out, spines exposed, and clapped it over the Master’s jugular, delivering the drug directly into the vein.

 

The Master fell unconscious with the proud sense that, in all the important ways, he’d won the argument.


	3. The Wasteland

Ace stirred, lifting her head.  For a moment, she cursed her decision to drug herself without checking the dosage.  The Doctor would be lecturing her for days on the idiocy of her actions, the dangers of doing what she had.  He’d roll his r’s so hard she’d worry he was going to burst a blood vessel, and then the real torture would start in. 

 

He’d give her that look—that pleading, disappointed, horribly hurt look—and he’d ask her why she didn’t tell him.  As though not telling him were some sort of snub.  Her protestations that she was trying to protect him would fall on deaf ears.  He would be sad and that look would send her spirits through the floor, and if he played his cards right, which he invariably would, she’d even cry. 

 

He was such a manipulative bastard.  She’d leave him in a second if she didn’t know that he meant that sorrow and that fear and that anger.  He did, though, from the bottoms of his hearts.  He meant it, and for that, Ace could never really hate him for playing her so well.

 

Only the Doctor was nowhere to be seen.  Come to think of it, neither was the med-bay. 

 

She was lying in the middle of a desert.  To her left she was shaded by a large boulder big enough that she would have to hop a bit to sit on it.  Above her the sky was brilliantly blue.  It stretched out for seemingly ever, without a single cloud to mar its azure perfection. 

 

Slowly, she rose to her feet, swaying before steadying herself on the boulder.  Wherever she was, the medications had worn off.  She had a sudden fear that the Doctor had had enough and just left her on some planet.  He’d dropped her here and was already off finding himself a new companion; one who wouldn’t try to kill him or medicate herself into a coma.

 

But no.  For all that she couldn’t see him, Ace could still smell him.  She had the strangest sense that the entire desert smelled of the Doctor.  How odd that a desert should carry his scent on the wind.

 

She looked about and took in the view.  All around her, brown dust and scrub vegetation stretched out, punctuated by boulders.  There were craggy mountains on the horizon to her left, and to her right the desert stretched on forever.  A sea of browns.

 

She heard the rustling of the scrub and turned.  It was still there, still stalking her.  The great cat sat on its haunches, blinking amber eyes at her in accusation.

 

“Who are you?” she asked.  She was tired of running.

 

It continued to blink.  Apparently, she wasn’t enough of a threat to attack quite yet.  That, or it was playing with her.  She remembered playing with the Doctor in a similar manner, but banished the thought.

 

Ace took a step forward.  “Who _are_ you?” she asked again.

 

“You already know,” said a voice behind her.

 

Ace whirled and was confronted by the Doctor.  He sat, wearing his wing-tips, dark khaki trousers and a white button-down.  No hat, no jacket, no pullover, no braces, no plaid brogues.  He looked so . . . normal.

 

The Doctor smiled, and she knew he wasn’t the Doctor.  It wasn’t the Doctor’s smile.  It was hers. 

 

“I already know,” she said, and she did.  Maybe she always had.  She expected to wake up, because one usually did that sort of thing when one realized the dream, but she had no such luck.  The desert was just as solid, and the Doctor’s smile sharpened into something cruel. 

 

“You forced this confrontation on me,” he said.  “You can’t just turn around and leave now that you know.”

 

“Like hell I can’t,” she muttered, pinching herself.  Nothing happened, and she pinched harder.  She started to feel a welling of fear in her chest.  How could she not wake up?  She slapped herself.  Her cheek stung from the impact, the desert wind whistled in her ear, and nothing changed.  She was trapped.

 

“So, what am I supposed to do here?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady and her gaze level as she met her adversary’s stolen eyes.  It was terrible to look into those achingly familiar eyes and see nothing.  Not even a parody of the affection they usually held.  “Duke it out with a virus?”

 

He cocked an eyebrow.  “I’m no virus,” he said.

 

“Don’t start splitting hairs,” she snapped.  She was in no mood for the Doctor’s mind games, especially when it wasn’t even the Doctor.

 

“I’m not,” he said.  “I am far more than a virus.  I’m you.  I’m the hateful thought, the passing cruelty, the unrestrained aggression.  I am the moment when you stormed out of your house and away from your mother.  I am every cruel word you’ve ever said to those you love.”

 

“Liar.”

 

He hopped off the boulder and strolled forward.  She couldn’t back up, because she still had a cat at her back.  He drew near and she looked up at the imposter who had stolen her Doctor’s face.  “Darling Dorothy,” he purred, “I’m—”

 

She stepped all over his evil overlord spiel.  She’d heard it enough to be able to recite it with him, and she didn’t want to hear those words in that voice.  Playing her bravado, she said, “You’re Evil Since the Dawn of Time?” she snarled.  “Sorry, mate, but Fenric’s got you beat.  A few others too, I’m sure.  You?  You’re just a parasite in my head, trying to scare me.  And if you’re not a parasite, then you’re just the part of my brain the parasite’s managed to win over.  Either way, bog off.”

 

He chuckled, and the sound shivered down her spine because that _was_ the Doctor’s laugh.  “Do you really think you can explain this away so easily?” he asked. 

 

“Yeah, I do.”

 

Instead of replying, he brushed a hand across her cheek.  Ace jerked back as though stung, and she stared at him.  She didn’t want to admit it, but fighting the Doctor—even such an obvious imposter—was going to be grueling.  Sometimes he was so like her Doctor, but then he’d do something like that, something her Doctor would never do, and all the while he would be wearing her Doctor’s face.  He would put thoughts in her head about things she’d never (not really, anyway, not seriously) considered before.  He’d confuse her and blindside her.  He’d come at her where she was weakest.  This wasn’t a fight of fists, but of willpower.  The first to lose cohesion, to forget who they were and what they would do if the situation was actually real, would lose.  And Ace knew enough about the virus to know that the loser didn’t get a silver medal and a ‘try harder next time’ pep talk.  If she lost, she was gone, and the monster wearing her face would kill the real Doctor.

 

That was enough to prompt action.  She punched the imposter Doctor in the face, knocking him flat.   "Nobody,” she said, “and I mean _nobody_ gets to do that without my permission.”

 

The great cat growled and Ace turned, ready to face the real threat at last.  The fake Doctor was just there to wind her up.  The cat was the real problem.  The cat was the thing eating her mind.  The fake Doctor was just its mouthpiece.

 

Or was he?  Was he even related to the cat?  In this space, what she felt counted just as much as what she could see or hear or taste, and they didn’t feel the same.  The cat was a force of nature, a silent predator moving through her mind and taking over without the need to declare its presence.  It required no speech because it had no excuses for its behavior.  It was what it was, and that was no more evil to the great cat than breathing or eating or sleeping. 

 

The fake Doctor, though, that was a whole different breed of bad.  She thought back to what he’d said about himself.  The hateful thought.  The unrestrained aggression.  All the cruel words she’d said, and the hatred roiling inside her when she’d left her mother behind.  Her secret joy when she’d realized she would never have to see Audrey McShane again if she didn’t want to.

 

She had many suspicions as to what the fake Doctor was: perhaps he was simply her own negative emotions amplified by the virus, but she doubted that neat theory.  He was foreign to her, she thought.  She would recognize herself even in her worst attributes, but he was unrecognizable under the Doctor’s visage.  Her fears began to magnify.  The great cat was already an enemy she didn’t know how to beat, but at least the cat would be up-front about the battle.  It would tear her throat out when she knew what was happening.  The fake Doctor was an enigma, and that made him the real threat.

 

His voice whispered in her ear, “I’ll come at you sideways.  Inside out.”

 

She swung around, but he wasn’t there.  He was behind her again, his fingers brushing through her hair.  She spun and he was still behind her.  She couldn’t face him. 

 

So she didn’t try.  She closed her eyes and she pictured her Doctor, the real Doctor, in her mind’s eye.  As the imposter slid a finger down her spine, she focused on how the real Doctor touched her.  If she was in danger, or the situation was likely to get ugly, he never hesitated.  He would grab her wrist, shove her out of harm’s way, clutch her close and broadcast that unmistakable message that anything which wanted to harm her would have to get through him first.  And woe betide anything that tried that.

 

But when things were calm he was awkward.  He would tap her on the nose or squeeze her shoulder, but anything beyond that was too much.  All attempts were aborted before they happened, and he would retreat into himself with that disquieted look on his face.  It was endearing in its own way, how hesitant he was to infringe on her personal space even after all this time.

 

She focused on the Doctor, and as she did the imposter retreated.  She felt him draw back as her reality reasserted itself.  She opened her eyes and he was once more in front of her.  He didn’t seem angry, but he was definitely calculating. 

 

“Not such a pushover as you might think?” she asked, lifting her chin in defiance.

 

He lifted a brow.  “And which reality would you prefer?” he asked. 

 

And he was gone.  There was a puff of breeze and he disintegrated.  Ace shuddered.  She could still smell him.  That scent of the Doctor, which at first had seemed so comforting as it enveloped her on the alien terrain and reminded her that she was not alone, now seemed cloying, the tangible reminder that her adversary was still there.  He could see her every move.  Every breath she took inhaled that scent.  It was her against the world, literally, because her enemy was anything and everything.

 

The great cat sat on the desert plain and watched her.  She stared into its eyes.  The black pawns and the white pawns . . . a game of chess for the fate of the universe.

 

“Kitty,” she said, “there’s a lot more going on here than just you and me, and I think it’s about time we had a chat.”

 

The great cat blinked and waited for her to begin.


	4. Deal with the Devil

A familiar hum, pitched just wrong.  The rhythm of the engines, the throb of power, the very heartbeat of his TARDIS, everything was off.  The only thing that still sounded right was the outside thrum of the vortex against the transdimensional walls of his craft. 

 

He had refitted and rewired every inch of his ship, and he knew exactly how it should seem.  In all the universe his ship was unique, and it sounded different than any other.  No, not just different.  Better.  But now some interloper had been at his circuitry, and everything was wrong.  His entire TARDIS sounded as though it had gone without a decent tune-up for centuries.  Surely he couldn’t have been out that long.

 

He cracked his eyes open, squinting against the light.  His vision was excellent in the dark: with even the tiniest amount of light, he could see and navigate any space.  He could slink through the shadows unnoticed, his footfalls silent.  He often wondered why the cheetah planet was so bright.  The inhabitants would have fared so much better in the dark.  Then again, perhaps the photosensitivity was a uniquely Gallifreyan response to the virus.  After all, one couldn’t expect a Time Lord to react to anything in the same manner as a mere human.

 

The room was flooded with light.  This brightness bothered him.  Whoever had damaged his delicate circuitry and power balances had also been tampering with the environmental controls.  He’d turned the temperature up in his TARDIS after he’d taken over the new body with its limited climatic tolerances.  Then, when he contracted the virus, he turned down the lights on his ship, adjusting to his newfound photosensitivity.  Now the ship was chilled and the lights almost blinding. 

 

And when did he procure a spare bedroom with a pink ceiling?  His TARDIS would never act so indecorously, even under outside coercion.  They were much of a mind in that regard, his TARDIS and he.  Both staid, careful, shadowed.  Even if he had been unconscious and some vandal had attempted to rewire his ship, it would still maintain its basic makeup, and that did not allow for pink spare rooms.

 

Then it hit him.  What was more likely: that another rogue Time Lord had hijacked his TARDIS, kept him aboard for entertainment value, and rewired the whole system badly, or that this place, no matter how close a replica, was not his TARDIS?  Wrong room, wrong sounds, wrong ship. 

 

And if it wasn’t _his_ TARDIS, then . . .

 

He’d been kidnapped by the Doctor.  The audacious fool had actually presumed to physically knock him out and drag him back to his TARDIS!  Of all the humiliating things that could have possibly occurred. . . Then again, why would the Doctor pass up such a golden opportunity to disgrace him?  Especially when his pet human was on the line?

 

“You’re awake,” his captor said, perched in a chair next to the bed.  The Master tried to lunge in his direction.  He got all of six inches away from the Doctor before he was repelled with enough force that he landed back on the bed, dazed and furious.  “Temporal grace circuits,” the Doctor said.  “They’ve been off-line the past week, much to my very-near misfortune, but I finally got around to fixing them right before I picked you up.”  The look he gave the Master was pure, saccharine smugness.  “I thought you’d appreciate my mechanical aptitude.”

 

Forced pacifism.  Lovely.  The Master growled.

 

“You’ve kidnapped me,” he said, feeling the need to point it out.

 

“Yes I did.”

 

“Your other selves wouldn’t have.”

 

The Doctor waved off the comment.  “Times and Time Lords change.  You know that as well as I do.  Perhaps better than I.”

 

The Master sat up and looked hard at the Doctor.  He was so deceptively small, and his face was so very affable.  There was something childish about him, or perhaps merely childlike.  Whichever it was, the Doctor seemed harmless.  Perhaps innocent, if one didn’t look too hard at those ancient eyes.  What a perfect disguise. 

 

The Master swung his feet off the bed and delighted in the fleeting tension he saw pass through the Doctor.  Not as confident as he seemed, then.  Both of them knew that physical violence was not the only form of damage he could do the Doctor.  There were a thousand ways to destroy him without touching a hair on his head, and his behavior of late had presented the perfect means. 

 

The Master leaned in and purred, “What was it that Earth philosopher said?  ‘When hunting monsters, be sure you don’t become one; for when you look into the void, it looks back into you.’  Tell me, Theta, which void did you look into?  Which monster finally got to you?”  He leaned back, sitting against the wall with his legs draped across the bed and crossed at the ankles.  He allowed a lazy smile to flit across his face, just wide enough to hint at those omnipresent fangs.  “I heard about Skaro,” he said.  “Genocide suits you, old friend.”

 

The Doctor looked angry and helpless.  And what could he do?  He could argue and be caught in an obvious lie.  The temporal grace circuits prevented him from attacking just as much as they prevented the Master, and at any rate, an attack would prove the accusation.  He could even ignore the question and accept by omission the Master’s veracity.  The Doctor had no options. 

 

Check and mate, and another game went to the Master.  Koschei had always beaten Theta at chess.  The only person he’d never been able to defeat was himself, but it was boring playing a one-sided game.

 

Almost as boring as participating in one-sided conversations.  “So,” he said, “I take it I’m here to assist you with your companion’s . . . predicament.  What precisely is it you believe I can do?  Sit her down?  Talk her through the disease?  Five stages of accepting her feral nature?  Really, Doctor, I’m no one’s first choice to play nurse-maid.”

 

The Doctor’s eyes were ice.  “I don’t need you to be a nurse-maid.  I need you to be what you’re best as: an engineer.”

 

The Master arched an eyebrow.  That was another thing he had to admit to liking about this new Doctor: he was anything but predictable.  “And what do you propose I engineer?”  It would be novel, whatever it was.  The Doctor had a plan, and anything could happen.

 

“A neural link-up.”

 

Not what he’d expected, and not what he wanted.  His voice was flat and hard as he said, “Not my area.”

 

The Doctor was not to be deterred, and drew a blueprint out from under his chair.  He spread it out on the bed and forced the Master to scoot back lest he get buried under schematics.  He didn’t want to appear interested, but it wasn’t every day his sworn enemy kidnapped him for his engineering expertise.  He cast a casual glance over the plans.

 

What he saw was like liquid oxygen to his mind.  Every one of his thoughts froze.  It wasn’t possible.  Even the Doctor wasn’t that crazy, not to mention suicidal.  “A mind-bender,” he said.

 

The Doctor nodded, humming his agreement.  His eyes were fixed on the plans.  The Master knew that look.  It never changed.  Every incarnation had a variant: that utter consumption of attention and imagination.  The Doctor was so far along the road that the Master couldn’t hope to derail any idea, no matter how insane. 

 

“All it is, in reality, is a device created to engineer a mental space in which more than one being can coexist,” the Doctor said, spreading his fingers over the plan as though he could make it rise off the paper, constructed by will alone.  He went on, “It’s true that the original purpose was combat, but theoretically anything could be done in that space.  The Matrix, for instance, could be called a far more complex, far vaster version of the mind-bender, and it’s used for the storage and perpetuation of knowledge.  Not for combat.”  He stopped, appearing to consider his words.  “Not usually.”

 

The Master shook his head.  The Doctor wasn’t trying to make him feel guilty about that, was he?  There was nothing to be guilty about!  It had been a legitimate plan to extend and possibly even save his own life.  But of course, the Doctor would never see things that way.  The Master could argue until he was out of breath, and he would still be cast as the villain of the piece by the ever-so-righteous, hypocritical, planet-killing Doctor.

 

He wasn’t going to save himself by going over old business, so he redirected his efforts into trying to bring the Doctor back to a more rational frame of mind.  “If combat ensues, this device ensures that injuries meted out in your mind manifest in the physical realm.”

 

“Concern?” the Doctor asked, not bothering to look up.  “I wouldn’t have expected you to worry about my well-being.” 

 

“Normally I wouldn’t, although I would prefer to kill you myself.  This is different.  I doubt you’ll have left your TARDIS controls unlocked, and if you die, I won’t be able to rematerialize this ship anywhere.  I’d be trapped in your TARDIS for the rest of eternity.”

 

The Doctor shrugged, demonstrating the extent of his concern for the Master’s worry.  He was such an irritatingly single-minded creature.  “We’re going to need three inputs,” he said.  “One will have to be modified to conform to human neurochemistry and physiology, of course, but the other two should be relatively straightforward, given the schematics.”  He stopped, realizing his error.  “That is to say, one should be straightforward.  The other will have to be tweaked to accommodate your . . . hybridized condition.”

 

Silence descended.  The Master was stung, despite himself.  He didn’t know which incensed him more: that the Doctor had somehow managed to forget his condition, or the word ‘hybridized.’  Was that what he looked like to a fellow Time Lord?  A freakish conglomeration of Trakenian physiology and a Gallifreyan mind, both twisted by the cheetah virus into something . . . hybridized? 

 

He stiffened, not wanting to give away his discomfort, but he also made sure his fangs were hidden.

 

The Doctor finally bothered to look up.  The Master expected a snide remark, an extra shot while he was temporarily unable to make riposte, but the Doctor, as always, was unexpected.  Horribly, infuriatingly, devastatingly so.

 

His face wore an expression of penitence.  “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was so low that even the Master could scarcely hear it.  “That was uncalled for.” 

 

The Master hated that look, hated the sense that the Doctor was actually reaching out to him.  How dare he do this _now_?  After everything they’d done to one another, this level of empathy was unbearable.  The Master tried to ignore how strangled he sounded when he said, “Spare me your pity, Doctor.”

 

For once, the Doctor did as he was told.  He ducked his head and went back to studying the blueprint.  “I believe we can link the interface and the mindscape projector directly into the TARDIS,” he said, his tone normal but for a loathsome remnant of compassion.  “She’s already juggling so much spatial configuration, a bit more shouldn’t hurt, and that way we’re also guaranteed a steady power-source.  No risk of joggling the connection and killing us all.”

 

Us all.  The mention of three inputs had been overshadowed by the faux pas, but the Master was struck by the Doctor’s true intentions so suddenly and with so much force that he scrambled off the other side of the bed and to his feet, putting distance between himself and his jailor. 

 

The Doctor may have needed an engineer, but that wasn’t to be the end of the Master’s involvement.  No, he had to build the machine and then use it!  Not only was the Doctor plotting a suicide mission into a deranged human mind, but he intended to drag the Master down with him.

 

He wanted to knock the Doctor into a wall, shake him until he started thinking with a modicum of sense and not this damned blind loyalty.  The state of temporal grace impeded him from doing anything more than stalking around the bed and over to the Doctor.  He hissed, “You persist under the delusion that I’m going to participate in this exercise in futility.”

 

The Doctor didn’t look away from the blueprint.  “Oh, you are.”  His voice had lost any hint of its previous softness.  Apparently, his regret only lasted until it interfered with his plans.  At any other moment, the Master would have applauded this ruthlessness.  It was hard to be enthused, however, when it was his life at stake.

 

The Master growled.  He was getting desperate enough that even bargaining sounded good.  He knew the Doctor in this mood, and if he had any hope of coming out of this experience with his mind intact, he had to come up with a better option and _now_.  “Very well,” he spat.  “I’ll design this monstrosity for you, if you really want it, but there’s a much simpler, more direct route to take: just go into her mind and confront whatever it is you feel you must confront.  I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about the disease.”

 

“Hmmm . . . that’s just the problem: I don’t know what I want to know.  I won’t know until we get there.  Now, the mind-bender should create a more tangible playing field, some degree of stability.  Direct mind-to-mind contact is an abstract, slippery venture.  No, the interface is the way to approach this . . .”

 

“I am not designing this thing for you if there’s the remotest chance you’re going to force me to use it,” the Master said, and a smug sense of accomplishment settled over him as the Doctor straightened, finally looking away from his blueprint. 

 

“Yes, you are,” he said.  “You will design this, and then you’ll accompany me to save Ace.”

 

“I don’t see any way you can make me,” the Master said, the very picture of reason in the face of this obstinate, suicidal devotion.  “If you drug me, I won’t be able to construct the apparatus, and even if you wait until after I’ve finished building it to drug me, all you would be dealing with is a mind too confused to help you at all.”

 

The Doctor’s smile was chill, almost cruel.  “If you don’t build this machine and aid me in its use, I will leave you on the first child-planet I can find: lots of green grass and game for you to hunt.  You can live out your days trapped on a single planet until this stolen body gives out and you perish alone: just as much an animal as you plan on making my companion.”  He folded the blueprint in careful, measured motions, set it aside, and rose.  Their gazed locked.  “How long do you think you could hold out before you lost yourself to the virus?  A week?  Two?  With all that prey, all that warm, rushing blood . . . what’s the radius on your sense of smell?  I doubt there would be anywhere you could go to escape the virus then.  No crystals to run to.”

 

The Master gaped at him.  This wasn’t the Doctor of old, who went out of his way to be sure that as few people were hurt as possible.  This Doctor would not only die for his companion, as so many of the others had done.  This Doctor went one step further: he would kill for her.  He would sentence his oldest friend to a slow, torturous death for some human girl he picked up Rassilon only knew where.

 

The Doctor looked back to his blueprints, but not before the Master saw the flash of guilt in his eyes.  “Times and Time Lords,” he whispered.

 

Yes, he’d kill for his companion, the Master realized, but he’d hate himself for it.  And he wouldn’t do it in front of her.  One of his weaknesses was the desire for select others to like him.  Koschei should know.  So long ago the memories were cobwebbed, _he_ had been that select other.  They had seemed so perfect.  An unstoppable, unbreakable force.  What a fool he’d been.

 

He wanted to tear the Doctor’s throat out for reminding him of that time.  They had been so innocent, so pathetically young and hopeful.  All that power at their fingertips and not the first clue as to its proper uses.  In the end it had been Theta, not he, who had failed to go all the way, to see their grand designs come to fruition.  They’d parted ways forever, and this became clearer with each subsequent reunion.

 

The Master swept out of the room, not wanting to see Theta instead of the Doctor.  He liked his encounters with the Doctor brief and vicious.  One strike and then off he went.  If he stayed around the Doctor too long, older feelings of friendship, of reflection and sympathy welled up and left the world grayscale.  You couldn’t play chess in grayscale.

 

He found himself outside the med-bay and glared at the door.  The Doctor’s TARDIS always did have an attitude.  His TARDIS would have never presumed to make that sort of spatial comment to him, but the Doctor’s TARDIS didn’t even give it a second thought.  Just sent him careening to the med-bay.  He was tempted to walk on and show the impetuous machine that he wasn’t about to give in to such obvious manipulation.

 

The temptation to look was strong, though.  The Doctor’s human . . . he hadn’t really had time to study her during their last encounter, what with both of them getting infected by the cheetah virus.  She’d been a brief, unremarkable flash on the periphery of his vision, just as any human might be, but now she warranted a second look.  After all, any being that could prompt the good and righteous Doctor to threaten a slow, lonely death, even upon an enemy, was a being of particular interest. 

 

He turned and palmed the door open.  The smell of antiseptic made his head spin for a second, and he stood still, waiting for his senses to adjust to the new environment.  This room too was over-bright.  Maybe even brighter than the rest of the TARDIS.  He squinted against the glare and focused his eyes on the pale figure laid out on the exam table.  With gliding steps, he drew closer. 

 

The human was small, square-jawed, with dark blonde hair spread about her head and hanging in long tendrils from the table.  Again, he thought, she was unremarkable.  She was too angular and not nearly delicate enough to qualify for the human definition of beauty, let alone Gallifreyan beauty, so he doubted that the Doctor’s reasons for attachment were aesthetic in nature.  From what little the Master could recall, she seemed reasonably intelligent.  Still, she was a human and not a Time Lord, so the Doctor’s devotion was not due to her staggering intellect either.  Everything about this slip of a human was just . . . average.  As for the possibility that her sum was greater than her parts, or whatever such nonsense humans spouted, well, it was a logically unsound assumption.  What she had was what she was, and what she was happened to be average.

 

Of course, maybe there was nothing special about her, but it was the Doctor who had changed.  Regeneration had given him a detachment and a conviction he’d lacked in previous bodies.  Maybe he would have attached himself to the first human he found regardless of his or her qualities, and as chance would have it, the human in question just happened to be her.

 

No matter.  In either scenario the Doctor had a strong attachment to this human, and that made her valuable.  He looked down at the Doctor’s human and realized that he just might be able to turn this debacle into an opportunity.  This was the human who had, whether she was the cause or not, seen the change occur.  She knew this Doctor, this slippery, dangerous new Doctor, and the Master was going to be given carte blanche access to her mind.  If the Doctor intended to force him into the hell of the unrestrained cheetah virus all over again, he needed to make it worth his while.  He needed to figure out how to maneuver with this Doctor.

 

He patted the unconscious girl on the cheek.  “Very well,” he said, “we’ll play this game, and you, my dear, are going to help me win.”

 

The Master looked her over one last time and then turned and swept out of the med-bay, his cape flapping behind him.  He strode back through the halls and his mind was once again clear.  The anger and the helplessness were gone, dismissed as unproductive emotions. Only his mind would get him out of this.  His mind, and a willingness to seize an opportunity when it presented itself.

 

The Doctor was still working on the blueprint, drawing lead-wires and tubes between certain points.  The Master snatched the print from his hand and the Doctor started.  The Master ignored the look of consternation he had earned and left, saying, “Really, Doctor, your grasp on these concepts is childish at best.”  The Doctor made a small noise of distress behind him and the Master smiled.  His smile grew as he heard the Doctor rise and follow him.  “I expect you slept through your engineering lectures at the Academy, didn’t you?  Connecting the neural feed to the spatial matrix directly is guaranteed to blow out your synapses. Did you never hear of mediator coils?  Do you even have mediator coils?  And the leads connecting the three minds together need a bridging device of some kind.  Two minds are all well and good, but if you want to start adding a third mind into the mix, you have to have something to organize the flow of information.”

 

The Doctor didn’t say a word.  How could he?  He had, after all, requested an engineer.  The Master couldn’t help himself.  He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Come, Doctor.  You can hand me tools.”

 

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed, but still he said nothing.  Good.  The Master was finally back in control.  He’d been kidnapped, forced into a suicidal plan to save an exceedingly average human female, and yet, in spite all that, he was the man in charge.


	5. Identity Crisis

They walked along, side by side: a girl and her cat.  Ace’s boots ground into the dust, leaving scuffed footprints.  The cat left no sign of its passage.

 

Maybe it was crazy, but Ace was taking the cat on faith.  It was the lesser, or at least the better-defined of two evils.  And they had the same ends in this fight.  Both of them wanted the imposter out of her head, so when the cat began to take the lead, she followed.  It headed into the desert, weaving amongst the scrub grasses.

 

Ace asked, “Why do you think it’s a desert, anyway?  I mean, I get that we’re in my head, and I get that this is just a representation I’ve conjured up, but why the desert?  Why a desert I’ve never seen?  It’s not the planet you come from.  It’s not any other place I’ve ever been.  Maybe I saw a picture once or something.”

 

The cat kept walking.

 

“It’d be nice if you could talk,” Ace said, feeling a little wistful.  She was used to a little conversation on her adventures.  While she was with the Doctor, they had always chatted away, even in the worst danger.  She tried to recall some of those conversations, but the words squirmed away.  They had been so clear a little while ago. 

 

Of course, the desert wasn’t exactly conducive to thought.  The heat was intense, the sun (which was nowhere to be seen.  It had to be there because the desert was so bright, but there was no physical sign of it in the sky) was almost blinding, and the dust which kicked up with the wind tasted like ash in her mouth.

 

“Where are you taking us?” she asked.  When the cat had begun to lead, Ace had assumed their deal was on: it would help her defeat the imposter, and they would call a truce.  Survival of the fittest didn’t have to mean an individual.  Sometimes the fittest option was a duo whose skills complemented each other. 

 

She and the Doctor worked like that.  She was the girl with the firepower and the gusto.  A lot of energy, but no real experience.  He knew what he was doing.  He could plan and scheme and he always knew which moves to make.  At least in that way, the imposter was a lot like him.  In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if the people they fought viewed the Doctor as she viewed the imposter.  It was all a matter of perspective, really.  The Doctor and his doppelganger were remarkably alike . . .

 

Ace gasped as she realized what she had been thinking.  How could she compare the imposter and her Doctor?  They had nothing in common.  The only similarity was the imposter’s stolen face, and even that was wrong.  Certain expressions the Doctor never wore.  Certain emotions he never felt.  She could remember which ones.  She could.

 

She shook her head.  She’d stopped while she thought, and the cat was further away.  Ace ran to catch up, but the patch of ground she dashed across was covered in tangled, dry grass.  Ace tried to step over the curling blades, but they were sharp and caught at her legs, tiny bits breaking off and sticking into her when she wasn’t expecting it.

 

She kept running, trying to ignore the little stabs of pain and get back to the cat.  If she could catch up, they would be able to find their way through the desert, and once out, she was certain they could beat the imposter.  She didn’t know why, but she was certain, and in this place, a certainty was good enough.

 

More of the blades caught in her jeans, and Ace felt like there were angry ants swarming up and down her legs, biting her in unpredictable locations. She staggered to a halt and scrabbled at her jeans, but she couldn’t find a single fragment.  She tried to roll her jeans up to get a look inside, but they were straight-leg; and over her boots, there wasn’t any room to maneuver.  She forced a little of the fabric inside out, and there were no grass-shards or hungry insects, even though she’d felt them.  Could still feel them.

 

She looked behind her, and there was no path through the grass, no footprints.  She looked before her, and the cat was still moving, following some trail Ace couldn’t detect.  It was leaving her.  Ace started to follow, but her persistence only amplified the pain.  It felt less like ants now and more like thorns tearing at her skin. She limped to a halt again and looked down at her leg.  For a second, she saw a long knife stabbed through her calf.  In one side and out the other. 

 

Ace gasped and fell, grasping at her leg, but there was no knife.  “Think that’s funny?” she snarled at the desert in general.  The wind kicked up and whipped her hair into her face.

 

She dashed it away, and she saw the cat.  It was getting smaller in the distance, and panic gripped her.  Without the cat, she had no way of navigating this place.  It knew the terrain, but she was a stranger in a very strange land. 

 

Ace pulled herself to her feet and started running, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in her leg.  If she looked down, she would just see more illusory knives, and she had no time for hallucinations.  She had to catch up.  She cleared the patch of scrub, and the dust under her shifted about.  Her feet slipped and dug.  Dust crept into her boots around the tongue, and every step drove tiny grains up and into her foot through her socks.  Each particle seemed sharp, maybe even barbed.  She imagined grains of sand burrowing up into her foot like hookworms.  They would dig up through her entire body until they reached her brain.  Until they made her the desert.

 

The cat didn’t get closer, no matter how hard she ran.  It maintained its slow, leisurely pace, but it only got further away.  Soon it was only a speck on the horizon.  “Kitty!” Ace shouted.

 

And then it was gone.  Just vanished, as though it had never been there at all.  Ace sped up, thinking it might have just disappeared around a shrub or down an unseen hill.  The dust was pouring into her boots now, surrounding her feet and ankles, infiltrating her. 

 

She knew she mustn’t stop.  This was the imposter trying to confuse and slow her down.  She had to reach the cat, but when she got to the spot where the cat had vanished, there was nothing.  A clearing surrounded by low-lying shrubbery, and no hill.  And no cat.

It had abandoned her.  Why?  Their arrangement was something they both needed.  Then again, maybe she wasn’t the only one being played by the imposter.  Perhaps he had convinced the cat that she was still there to keep the cat just out of her reach.

 

The dust burrowed into her ankles and Ace sat down.  Her fingers flew to undo her laces.  She ripped off her boots.  She had no dust on her feet or in her socks.  She rolled up her jeans, trying to find the wiry fragments which still dug into her legs. 

 

She found one broken piece of grass.  She pulled her boots back on and did up the laces.

 

She felt beaten.  The imposter had separated her from her guide in the middle of the desert.  She looked up, but there was no change in the terrain which might indicate the cat’s intended destination.  Second verse, same as the first.  The only break in the dusty monotony was the mountain range in the distance.  Just purple lumps on the horizon; no larger than they had been when she and the cat had started walking towards them.

 

“What were you looking for, Kitty?” she asked, shielding her eyes against the glare and staring at the mountains, hoping for any indicator.

 

Flash.

 

Ace thought she’d imagined it, but she then saw it again.  It was a bright white light, as though someone was reflecting the sun in a mirror.  She bolted to her feet.  This was a sign.  It could be the imposter messing her about, but it could be something completely different.  It could be a way out, or a weapon.

 

Whichever was the case, it would be a development.  After the desert, even a negative development was something.  Ace started walking.  The wind shivered around her.

 

“Yeah,” she whispered, “not as slow as you thought I was, am I?”

 

“I never thought you were slow,” the imposter whispered back.  “If I thought you were slow, I wouldn’t care about you.”  She turned, and there he was, smirking at her.  “We have to stop meeting like this.”

 

“Ha friggin ha,” Ace said.  “You play the spoons too, or does the similarity stop with the face?”

 

“But it’s such a nice face.  You think so.”  He closed in, and Ace looked up, trying not to show him how intimidated she felt.  He brushed the stray hairs from her face.  “You are easily the prettiest one so far.  Did you know that?”

 

She knocked his hand away and stepped back. “You want to vanish the cat?  Fine.  You want to shove imaginary knives through my leg?  Go right ahead.  But get this.  You touch me again, and I don’t care what you are.  I’ll kill you.”

 

“Will you now?  The sentiment is delicious, but I have to wonder how you plan to dispatch me.  Claw my eyes out like your friend the cat?  But no.  You’re no cat.  We both know that’s completely wrong.”  He cocked his head, his eyes wide and innocent.  He looked so much like the Doctor. 

 

Ace had no answer.  She turned her back on him, holding herself stiff as she waited for an attack, and she stalked toward the mountains.  She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of her attention.  If he snuck up on her again, she would just keep walking.  What had she learned from the virus?  The one thing the Doctor had taught her, the only control on the mad, bad, and dangerous parts of her, was that sometimes, the only way to win the war was to deny the battle. 

 

So this was Ace denying the battle.

 

“Don’t threaten unless you’re prepared and able to carry through, Dorothy,” the imposter called.

 

Ace kept walking.  Fingers fluttered across her, but she ignored them, though her face was twisting with the effort.  The imposter wasn’t going to make this easy for her. 

 

Suddenly her legs felt heavy, slow.  She looked down and she was buried hip-deep in the dust.  She looked over her shoulder, and the imposter seemed pleased. 

 

“What do you want?!” she demanded.  “The cat, I get, but what are you after?  You want to kill me?  Destroy me?”

 

“Oh, my dearest Dorothy, what makes you think I want anything at all?”  He had a tiny smirk on his face, but his eyes were alight with mirth.  They twinkled.  Just like the Doctor.  If he were really here, the Doctor would be shaking with suppressed laughter.  Even Ace had to admit it was a little funny.

 

No!  She didn’t!  The imposter had trapped her.  He was keeping her from the cat, keeping her from escape.  The fact that he could be charming was completely down to his stolen face.  He was using that humor, that sweetness, everything which made the Doctor dear to her, to throw her off.  Make her forget her purpose.

 

“You can ask that as I’m up to my backside in dust?” she flung at him, hoping the words stung.

 

“There are a thousand reasons I might stop you.  Not all of them malicious.”  He sauntered forward and crouched down to bring them eye-to-eye.  “How are we supposed to talk if you keep running away?”

 

It was too much.  Ace closed her eyes, trying to conjure up the real Doctor in her head.  How he smiled and how he laughed.  His real sense of humor as opposed to this imitation.  He was so unpredictable in some ways, but in others—in his affection and devotion to her—he was constant.  He wasn’t this thing.  This thing that smiled and lied and twisted her into knots. 

 

Although he _had_ done all of those things to her.  Sometimes he even knew what he did as he did it . . .

 

He was good, though.  That was the difference. 

 

Except when he wasn’t . . .

 

No, the Doctor wouldn’t hurt her unless the greater good was at stake, and even then, it wasn’t any real hurt.  Even if she remembered it years later, and felt that stab of betrayal still.  He meant well!  Wasn’t that the important thing?

 

His image wavered in her mind’s eye, and she couldn’t solidify it.  It kept bleeding into the imposter.  She couldn’t hammer down all the real differences.  Yes, the Doctor had rules concerning her, but they were broken when they had to be.  So even though Ace knew that there were differences, knew that this was not the Doctor, she couldn’t gather her thoughts enough to pinpoint why.

 

Dorothy opened her eyes and found herself all alone.  Alone and lost.

 

She was lost, and she couldn’t remember why.  Why was she in a desert?  Where was the TARDIS?  How had she got here, and why couldn’t she remember anything but a jumbled blur of a man who was supposed to be there with her?

 

Who was she?

 

“Doctor!” she gasped, pleading to the desert.  It was the only word of any importance she knew.

 

And he was there.  She knew without seeing that he was behind her, and when he cupped her cheek, she leaned into the touch.  “I’m here,” he said.  “I’m right here, Dorothy.”

 

She looked down at her own body, at the crimson dress flowing out about her like spilt blood.  The material was light and the breeze caught and rustled in its folds.  At least she had remembered to dress appropriately for the desert.  Her feet were bare, but the dust was too fine to be a bother, and there was no undergrowth to speak of.  Not now that the Doctor had found her.

 

And there he was in his wing tips, khakis and button-down.  He would know why they were in the desert.  He would know what she was supposed to do.  She recognized this with a giddy clarity she hadn’t felt since she was a child.  The Doctor always knew. 

 

Something about the situation niggled at her, telling her that things were wrong.  She ignored the doubt, pushed it aside.  After all, Dorothy was happy.  Wasn’t that what mattered?  In this place, she would follow the Doctor’s lead.  She didn’t have to worry. 

 

She smiled up at him and said, “It’s good to see you, Doctor.”

 

He slipped his arms around her and helped her to her feet.  He curled her close and whispered into her hair, “It took you a while to get here.”

 

“Were you waiting for me?”

 

“For hundreds of years.”

 

“That’s a long time.”

 

“Just a blink of an eye.”  He began to walk, and he pulled her along by the hand.  “Come along, Dorothy.”

 

Dorothy smiled and trotted along.  The doubts pulled at her again.  A tiny voice shrieked at her to wake up, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to awaken from.  This place was real.  Why wouldn’t it be?  The voice demanded to know why she would just hand the reins of her life over to this man, but he was the Doctor.  It made perfect sense for him to make the decisions, and she was happy.  If she’d known how happy she could be, she would have handed the reins over to him years ago.

 

There was a light flashing in the mountains, flashing in her eyes.  For a second, everything sprung into sharp focus and Ace ripped herself away from the imposter.  What the hell was she thinking?  She had to get away.  Had to get to the light.  She had to find the Doctor.  The real Doctor.  The Professor.  She lunged forward in a desperate bid to get past the imposter and get enough of a head start that she could reach the mountain before he could stop her.

 

Then, the light was gone.  Blocked by a sandcastle. 

 

Dorothy stumbled to a stop, her legs weak as a fawn’s.  She felt confused.  Why had she done that?  Why had she tried to run from the Doctor?  It must have been a passing illness caused by the sun.  She’d been out too long. 

 

The Doctor offered her an arm and she took it.  He was always a gentleman.  “Is the castle yours?” she asked.

 

“Oh, yes.  I built it while I waited.  Grain by grain, of course.  It’s the only way to build a proper sandcastle.”

 

“Of course,” she said.  It was beautiful.  Tall, elegant, with towers rising up where wet sand had been dribbled to form twisting spires.  The battlements had been smoothed with deliberation, and the gate was so carefully dug.  Everything was perfection, but what else would she expect from the Doctor? 

 

Dorothy looked at the sandcastle, and she knew that she was home.


	6. If It Doesn't Work . . .

The room looked like a hurricane had torn through it.  Bits of wiring, discarded lengths of tubing, piping, and other miscellaneous components had been flung haphazardly into every available corner.  The room’s two occupants were just as disheveled.  The Doctor had a tangle of bioluminescent tubing around his neck, waiting for use, and several boxes of assorted tools scattered about him.  His jacket had long since been discarded, and his pullover was covered in small, unraveling burnt patches.  His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his tie was somewhere in the guts of their creation, holding together a particularly sensitive bundle of cables.

 

The Master was no better.  Hours spent on his back constructing and wiring the undercarriage of the mind-bender had covered him in a patchy layer of pale gray dust, and his back was streaked with that self-same dust in much larger, more opaque quantities.  He, too, had discarded his fine black suit jacket and cape, thus saving them from destruction, but his white shirt had lost its crispness, and the collar was a crumpled mess no longer supported by his cravat, which had joined the Doctor’s tie.

 

Despite their appearances and their weariness, both Time Lords had temporarily disregarded their mutual loathing in favor of scientific discovery and creation.  The Doctor’s gaze was fixed on the darkened panel which would light up as soon as power was supplied and the mind-bender came to life.

 

The Master threaded the final power-lead through his cobbled-together bridging device and to the wall panel they’d pried open to access the TARDIS’ power supply directly.  “Watch that tubing,” he said.  “It should turn green when charged with artron particles.  If it turns any other color, we’ll have to shut down the entire apparatus to change the defective tubing.”  He didn’t have to mention what could happen if they left malfunctioning tubing in a biofeedback monitor.  The horrors of complete neural collapse were at the forefront of both their minds.

 

The tubing wasn’t their major concern, however.  For the past two hours and seventeen minutes they had been attempting to connect the mind-bender to the TARDIS’ power supply.  With a notable lack of success.  Once they had power, everything else should be ready.  The neural connectors were built, crafted for each physiological and neurochemical requirement and fitted into two chairs the Doctor had produced from one of his (many) junk rooms.  The frame was little more than a refitted clothing rack, but it suited their purposes.  No, the problem was the power.

 

The Doctor nodded.  The connection was made and the Master held his breath.

 

“Nothing,” the Doctor said. 

 

The Master snarled and pulled the lead from the wall.  This was their third attempt, and he still couldn’t get the balance right.  First there had been too much power and they’d ruptured their bio-leads.  Both Time Lords had spent frantic moments mopping up the leaking artron-charged plasma before it could corrode their microcircuits. 

 

The second attempt hadn’t utilized enough power, and the charge hadn’t even registered in the new leads.  They had shut the device down, and the Master had adjusted his calculations accordingly, certain that the next attempt would be perfect.

 

And now nothing. 

 

“Is the tubing properly connected?” he snapped.

 

“I connected it myself.”

 

“That’s why I asked.”

 

The Doctor checked on the tubing.  The Master had to appreciate that, even when insulted, the Doctor was willing to double-check his work.  “The connection is aligned properly.  There’s no interference,” he said.  “This isn’t the problem.”

 

“Which means there must be a factor I haven’t considered.”  The Master forced the words through clenched teeth as he felt a savage impatience shudder through him.  He wanted to break something, and he even cast about for a likely candidate.  The Doctor had his back turned, and his attention was too absorbed in his work to notice the vicious flash in the Master’s eyes.

 

The Master drew a deep breath.  With rather too much difficulty, he quashed the urge.  Breaking things was pointless, especially when there was so little that worked in the first place.  Breaking the Doctor was even more so, since nothing worked without him. 

 

The Master’s voice was much more composed when he said, “The real problem is that you’re asking me to engineer a device I only understand in theory, with parts that haven’t been used since . . . never.  These parts have never been used.  Why have you never used these?”

 

“I work with temporal mechanics, not the mechanics of the mind.  I’ve never had reason to explore how the mind can be displaced, stored, manipulated.  That’s your area and, by the way, why you’re here.”

 

“If you want this to work so passionately, you might have procured viable components instead of a five-hundred-year-old basic tool kit!” 

 

They glared at one another.  This wasn’t going to work.  Even genius had it limits.  Of course, admitting to this gave the Doctor the advantage.  He would know how far the Master’s intelligence really extended, and could exploit those limits. 

 

Failure was not an option.  The Master began checking the connections one at a time, guaranteeing that each component was still in working order, and that each connection was properly aligned.

 

If the problem wasn’t in the components, it was in his calculations for the power requirements.  If he couldn’t draw the right amount of power to correctly energize the components without damaging them or the minds they would link to, then the whole project would have to be scrapped.  And what would happen then?  The Doctor, bereft of his beloved-if-exceedingly-average human, would look to apportion blame.  One didn’t have to be a genius to guess who would be cast as the villain, who would be dumped on some backwater planet to be slowly consumed by his own inner predator.

 

The Master twisted a connection hard, locking it into place.  He could make this machine work.  He would make this machine work!

 

“Sort through every strand of bio-tubing,” he snapped, fingering a particularly inaccessible connection.  He couldn’t see it, so this would have to be done by touch.  “If it’s even slightly discolored, replace the entire length.  I don’t want the next attempt to rupture again.”

 

The Master dropped to the floor to lay on his back and scoot under the extended, spindly legs he’d attached to the clothing rack.  He ran his fingers over the connections and held out his hand in the general direction of the Doctor.  “Jeweler’s glass,” he said.

 

The eyepiece was slapped into his hand, which he slipped back under the rack and to his face.  The circuitry jumped into stark relief.  One component showed microscopic evidence of surface corrosion.  “Do you have another current regulator?” he asked.

 

He heard rummaging through boxes and the Doctor’s disembodied voice.  “If you insist on sending me to fetch parts, I’m never going to finish checking the tubing.”

 

“You have one simple job.  I have everything else.  You’ll fetch me whatever I ask.”

 

The regulator was tucked into his hand with much more care than was afforded the jeweler’s glass.  Even the Doctor understood that his components were a limited resource. 

 

The Master peered at the new current regulator, looking for degradation or corrosion.  Once he was certain that the new circuit would work correctly, he detached the wires and tubing from the old regulator, pulled it from its housing and replaced it.  He reconnected the wiring and tubes, and then moved on.

 

After everything was double and triple-checked, and both had done their own calculations for the power requirements and come to the same conclusion they tried to turn the mind-bender on once more. 

 

Once more, it failed.

 

Moving slowly, they both stepped away from the obstinately non-functional device, most likely both quashing the same urge to strike the malfunctioning machine.  The only patch of wall clear of equipment was next to the door, and the Master made for it and slumped to a sitting position.  The Doctor came over to join him.  So there they sat, two Time Lords in their shirtsleeves, glaring in despondency at their mutual enemy.  The mind-bender stood, powerless and gloating, and the Master wanted to break things again.

 

Once he’d controlled the impulse he glanced over at the Doctor, who sat cross-legged with his chin resting in his hands.  “It should be working,” the Master said.

 

“I know.”

 

“We’ve rechecked every connection.  I’ve done the calculations twenty different times and compensated for every possible variable.”

 

“I know.”

 

The Master had nothing more to say.  Everything which he could do had been done.  He’d actually been beaten by a machine.  A glorified clothing rack at that!  The humiliation completely outweighed anything else he might have felt: relief, that he would not have to subject his consciousness to the mind-bender, and terror, that the Doctor could still make good on his promises.

 

And then the Doctor was on his feet, a mad gleam in his eye.  “I have an idea,” he said, and dashed from the room.

 

The Master wasn’t sure what to think, except that this was typical Doctor.  Just when all hope seemed lost he would be struck by inspiration.  If he was to be honest, the Master envied him that talent.  He himself had always been slow and meticulous.  He could plan for every contingency, devise every potential solution to a problem, but he had never quite had the ability to think on his feet that the Doctor had.  It was, he supposed, why the Doctor had survived so long.  Quick thinking (and a staggering amount of luck) might be all he had to see him into his second millennium, given his consistent disregard for his own lives.

 

The Doctor returned wielding a metal club of some kind.  He hefted it with an experimental swing. 

 

“What is that?” the Master asked, alarmed and trying not to show it.

 

“Shock-negotiator.  I lifted it off a particularly helpful guard on Relaffa III.”  He met the Master’s gaze.  “It’s charged with artron energy.”

 

No.  The Doctor wasn’t that insane.  At least, this version of him wasn’t.  “You can’t be serious,” the Master managed.

 

“Plug the mind-bender in,” the Doctor said.  He stood next to their creation and he seemed supremely confident.  Some stroke of inspiration had indeed come upon him, and the Master had a horrible, creeping suspicion he knew what that inspiration would entail.

 

Clubs were for hitting things.  They were imprecise tools, and not high on the Master’s list of things-which-may-be-used-to-repair-intricate-machinery.  He got to his feet, feeling conflicted.  His reason told him to disarm the insane Time Lord wielding the club before permanent damage to the device was inflicted.  However, his lingering humiliation wanted the inspired solution to work.

 

He resolved the situation by promising himself that if the Doctor damaged the mind-bender beyond repair, the Master would damage the Doctor to a similar extent, temporal grace be damned.  He strode over to the open wall panel and threaded the connectors in.  One by one, each was slotted home.  He stepped back and looked to the device.

 

Nothing.  He had to concede that this was rather anticlimactic.  Perhaps he had more faith in the Doctor’s quick-thinking than was warranted.  It was hard to credit the notion that he might have placed his nemesis on some kind of pedestal, but such things had been known to happen.  The Master readjusted his view of the Doctor and formed an abrasive insult.  He looked over to the Doctor, ready to give it voice.

 

The Doctor was a bit too busy for insults.  Specifically, he was busy swinging the shock-negotiator at their creation.  The Master yelped and lunged forward.  He grasped the Doctor by the shoulder just as the club connected.  The entire room was lit in a shower of sparks as the current of artron energy from the shock-negotiator transferred to the mind-bender, as well as up the Doctor’s arm to the Master.  For a second, machine, Time Lords and TARDIS were all frozen together by the spike of power.  The Master felt energy slice through him, charring all cells in its path.  His body, unlike that of the Doctor, couldn’t withstand the shock.  He would have fallen, but he was locked in position.  He would have screamed, but his throat had constricted and his diaphragm had contracted.

 

Then the charge was gone.  The Doctor and the Master fell away from the mind-bender.  The Master couldn’t remember how to breathe, let alone speak or reason.  His heart was beating so fast he worried about fibrillation.  The Doctor’s fingers pressed into his throat for a brief moment, hitting a pressure point.  The Master felt his body relax as the pain was lessened and his heartbeat returned to a slower pace.  He gasped in a lungful of air.  The Doctor took his hand away and the Master sat up. 

 

For a moment everything was still, and the Master began to think that the Doctor had destroyed all their hard work in one ill-conceived swing of a club.  Then the wall-panel sprayed sparks and the clothing rack began to shake. 

 

The Doctor laughed, scrambling to his hands and knees.  The mind-bender continued to spray sparks, and energy arced from its metal struts, drawn to the walls and ceiling and any other available surface.  In spite of this, the Doctor seemed determined to crawl into the pyrotechnics.  He presumably wanted a closer look at the panels, never mind his own well-being or—more to the point—that of his unwilling associate.

 

The Master dragged the Doctor backwards and out of range.  The Doctor protested, but the Master would not allow the Doctor to be vaporized by a stray arc of energy.  It was from this relatively safe distance that they heard the low hum begin.  It started in the base of the mind-bender, and then moved up along its support struts to the long crossbar at the top.  The bioluminescence within the tubing all around the frame changed from blue to a brilliant green.

 

The Master realized he was still clinging to the Doctor like some sort of imbecile and scooted away, straightening his shirt.  “How did you know what to do?” he asked, trying to mask his grudging respect.  “How did you know that the energy contained within the club would create the proper catalyst to jump-start the device?”

 

“Oh, that was simple,” the Doctor said.  He rose and leaned on the shock-negotiator, a jaunty smile lighting up his face.  “I guessed.”

 

The Master didn’t know whether to admire the Doctor or throttle him.

 

“Beyond that, all I had was a belief in that old Earth saying.”  He turned and strolled out of the room.  “You monitor the mind-bender.  I’ll get Ace!” he called.

 

The Master didn't want to ask for an explanation he knew the Doctor was just itching to give, didn't want to give him the satisfaction.  But curiosity was a trait they shared, and the Master couldn't imagine what the people of Earth knew about the construction and powering of highly delicate apparatuses.  He wrestled with the question until the Doctor returned, wheeling his human in on a gurney.  As leads were attached to her head with a light touch and painstaking care, the Master simply watched.

 

The Doctor was even gentler with this girl than he had been with his beloved experiments at the Academy.  Theta had always valued individuals over machines.  Koschei had never understood why.  What did living creatures do but wither and die?  Almost all other sentient life forms in the universe had such short lives.  Barely even a century.  As a Time Lord, the Doctor should have understood the fleeting nature of organic life better than most.  Why then did he not understand the beauty of machinery?  A life would end, but a perfectly constructed machine could last forever.

 

The Doctor completed his task, oblivious to these musings, and said, "Let's plug ourselves in, then, shall we?"

 

The Master approached, taking hold of the leads crafted specifically for him.  The leads which, amongst the other components, contained the emergency-eject mechanism.  If they went in and discovered that the girl was already lost he would not allow the one man who could get him back to his TARDIS to die in a futile rescue attempt.  He would trigger the command.  They would exit the program.  The machine would self-destruct as they ejected and the girl would be killed.  It would all seem such a tragic accident, but to the Doctor’s mind the Master would have tried his best.

 

Satisfied that he had a back door out of this mission, the Master took his seat across from the Doctor.  The chairs were arranged to face one another with their feet bolted to the base of the mind-bender so that any involuntary movement on the part of the participant wouldn’t upset the delicate wiring.  The Master connected each lead to the specific point on his head where it would be able to access a certain portion of his mind.  The final lead was pressed into place over his temple, and he felt the barest tingle as the bio-gel made contact with his skin and began permeation. 

 

They regarded each other across the machine they had created, and the Master knew there was a question which still needed an answer.  “What was it?” he asked, as indifferently as he could.

 

“What was what?”

 

“The human saying.  What was it?”

 

The Doctor grinned at him.  A secretive, delighted grin.  “If it doesn’t work,” he said, “hit it!”

 

His hand came slapping down on the button which would activate the mind-bender.  The timbre of the hum emitted by the device altered to a lower, more powerful frequency as the mind-bender came fully on-line and encountered three minds connected to it through a hodgepodge of wiring and improvisation.

 

The Master felt his newly acquired body slump in his seat, but it made no difference.  He wasn’t there anymore.


	7. The Truth Reflected

The Master awoke on a rocky ledge just large enough for two Time Lords, a dead tree, and a small reflecting pool.  He lay on the water’s edge, and as he sat up he saw himself in the water: receding hairline emphasizing the contrast between pale skin and wolf-gray hair.  Hazel eyes.

 

The Master fell away from the pool, clutching at his chest with a hand he had forgotten over time.  Thin and delicate: an engineer’s hand with none of the clumsy musculature of Traken.  Even his clothing was new, or old depending on how he looked at it.  He wore a terribly familiar dove-gray three-piece suit and a carefully pinned black cravat. 

 

Across from him, slumped against the tree, the Doctor looked the same as he had on the TARDIS.  Same clothing, same rumpled hair.  The only differences in his appearance were the readdition of his suit-jacket, the Panama hat which now obscured part of his face, and the umbrella lying across his knees. 

 

If the Doctor was no different, why should the Master change?  And why did the change make him feel so bitter?  After all, wasn’t this what he had dreamed about?  Restoration of his true self?  None of this half-life within a short-lived, imperfect shell.  A true Time Lord in all respects.

 

Perhaps he hated this because it was a taste of what could never be.  This mindscape was teasing him with a life which was dead.

 

The Doctor opened his eyes and he stared.  The Master drew himself to his feet, all of his muscles responding as they once did.  He was fluid, graceful, but not feline.  His elegance was as superior, as evolved, as the body from which it came.  “Surprised, Doctor?” he asked, his voice softer and infinitely more precise.

 

The Doctor shut his mouth and said nothing.  There was nothing to say.  He got up with much less finesse, and looked out over the mindscape in which they found themselves. The Master did the same, turning his head and taking in a vast expanse of desert.  For a second he believed that the human girl’s mind had conjured the cheetah planet.  It was a logical construct for such a battle.

 

But this desert wasn’t right.  It was too flat, too unremitting.  This was somewhere else.  “I know this place,” the Doctor whispered, his eyes troubled.

 

“Where are we?”

 

“Where indeed?” the Doctor said.  He opened his mouth to continue, but then he shut it again and shook his head.  “Not yet,” he said.  “Not until I’m sure.”

 

There was a flash, and the Master held up a hand against the glare.  The Doctor peered into the gnarled branches of the dead tree.  They both saw a hand-mirror tied to a limb with a red ribbon.

 

“Metaphor,” the Master groaned, not believing his ill-luck.  “You have a companion whose mindscape works in _metaphor_.  Why do you travel with her?”

 

The Doctor was too busy trying to grab the mirror.  It was about three feet too high for either of them to reach.  “Come on, give me a boost,” the Doctor said.

 

“What?” the Master found himself blurting.  This was going from inconvenient to humiliating.  First he had been kidnapped.  Then all his vast experience and engineering expertise had been upstaged by a club.  Now he was expected to act as the Doctor’s stepladder?

 

He glanced over the edge and closed his eyes against the rush of vertigo.  Not even a Time Lord could survive that fall.  Yet the Doctor still expected the Master to hoist him into a dead tree inches away from the edge of an abyss.  A situation both humiliating _and_ insanely dangerous.  A tragically common state of affairs when dealing with the Doctor, it seemed.  The Axos debacle, that business in the prison, their battle in the Matrix, the unfortunate affair with the Rani, and now this.

 

Trying to sound as calm and reasonable as he possibly could, the Master said, “You cannot possibly think—”

 

The Doctor cut him off.  “There’s a mirror hanging from the branches of a dead tree in the middle of Ace’s mindscape.  What are the chances we’ll need that mirror at some point?”

 

He was right.  Insane, but right.  The Master walked over—staying as far back from the drop as he possibly could—and crouched down to get a good grip around the Doctor’s knees.

 

He boosted.  The Doctor overbalanced and ended up perched on the Master’s shoulder.  They swayed, but the Doctor grabbed a branch and remained stationary long enough for the Master to plant his feet. 

 

Then the Doctor was straightening.  Inch by inch he rose up and reached, one hand grasping the handle of the mirror and the other tugging at the end of the ribbon.  The bow that held it suspended slipped undone, leaving the Doctor clutching their prize.

 

The Master lowered him to the ground and stepped away from the precipice.  The Doctor, displaying his usual lack of common sense, stood on the very edge as he examined the mirror.  The wind coming off the mountains caught at him and he swayed.  The Master’s hearts gave a lurch at the sight and he hauled the Doctor to safety with a single hard tug at his arm.  The Doctor didn’t even bother bemoaning his rough treatment.  All his attention was diverted.  He held up the mirror so it caught the light, and peered into its depths.

 

“What do you see?” the Master asked.

 

“Myself,” the Doctor said.  He sounded disappointed.  Of course he may well have been expecting to see the secrets of life, or at least the secrets of his human. 

 

The Master snorted his derision.  How like the Doctor to see a mirror and think of what it could be instead of observing what it was.  When the Master saw a mirror in a tree, even a mindscape tree and a mindscape mirror, he assumed that he would see his reflection when he looked into it.  It was the logical conclusion to make.  He snatched the mirror from the Doctor’s grasp, taking a single glance to confirm his suspicions.

 

The mirror dropped to the ground as the Master gasped and backed away, blanching white.

 

“Careful!” the Doctor said.  “You could have—what did you see?”

 

Wouldn’t he like to know?  But what the Master had seen in the mirror wasn’t something he was about to share with the Doctor.  The skeletal features, the decaying flesh.  His thirteenth body rotting around him.  His force of will was all that had kept him from giving in, and now . . . what if it was real?  What if the decay wasn’t in his body, but in his mind?  What if his very essence was rotting away?  Would he even know if his intellect was falling apart around him?

 

Weakness swept through him and he felt that endless pain once more.  He felt the horror and the inevitability, the cold, grasping hand of death.  He hadn’t escaped.  In the end there were forces even the Master was unable to fight.  He would die.

 

Whatever was at work here was not the virus.  He had forged an intimate acquaintance with the virus, and this was much more malicious.  It didn’t target his aggression, but his fear.  He couldn’t counter such an attack.  There was a certain strength in rage, no matter how primitive, but terror was weakness.  In this state he was helpless, with no recourse.  He had to run.  He had to get out and away from this thing.  Blindly, he triggered the eject command in his mind. 

 

Nothing happened.

 

Terror welled up, strong and honest.  The eject command had failed.  Had the Doctor somehow foreseen his plan and taken measures to counteract it?  No, the mechanism was still there, still receiving power and transmitting a signal.  It should work!  And if there was no problem with the device itself, then something was blocking _him_.  He grasped desperately for some calm, but failed.  His hearts raced, his blood pounded in his ears.  He was trapped and decaying and—

 

And slapped.  Hard.  The Master came back to himself with a snap of shock, staring up into wide gray eyes.  What in Rassilon’s name . . .

 

“The mirror isn’t what you think,” the Master said, pleased his voice was so steady. 

 

“Tell me what you saw!” the Doctor said, his expression a sort of frantic inquisition.

 

Could he even put into words what he’d seen?  One of his worst fears, yes, but that seemed to be a drop in the ocean.  For once, his need to understand slammed up hard against a desire for ignorance.  Something in him wanted to cling to delusions.

 

Delusions were useless, though, and in this place they might even be deadly.  He couldn’t be harmed by what he had already accepted.  The discomfort would be a small price to pay for his survival, and he had already paid much more than this.

 

So the Master accepted, and something in him wrenched and died as he did.  “I saw truth,” he said.

 

“Truth?”

 

“Yes, Doctor, truth.  I do recall what truth feels like.”

 

The Doctor held his hands up, all innocence.  As though the Master didn’t see through that façade.  “I wasn’t going to bring it up.”  The Doctor’s placating tone was astonishingly irritating.

 

“You didn’t have to.”  The Master’s retort was harsh, even to his ears.  “Innocent questions, little remarks, you don’t change.  You’ve lied more than you’ve ever told the truth.  And I always knew when you lied; I could always see through you.  Especially when you didn’t want me to.”

 

That shot told.  The Doctor looked uncomfortable when he said, “Yes.  You’ve always known me.”  And then his gaze hardened, and he was ready with a rebuff.  “As I’ve known you.  And if you always knew when I was lying to you, then I always knew when you were holding something back.” 

 

“Doctor,” the Master warned, but it was far too late.

 

“I can see why truth would come as a shock to you, given the choices you’ve made and the toll they had to take, but not to the extent that I saw.  Not enough that it almost killed you.”

 

“Killed me?  You exaggerate, Doctor.”

 

“Do I?  You _changed_.  You shuddered, and I saw you decay, but then you . . . I saw you phase in and out of existence.  And all right, maybe ‘truth,’ as you put it, could cause your mental image to manifest differently here.  That I could accept, but the phase-shift . . . that was something else, wasn’t it?”  The Doctor stepped closer, his natural distance evaporating with the promise of discovery.  His gaze was penetrating, as though he would divine the Master’s secrets in the lines on his face.  For a second that seemed plausible. 

 

Pushing through all the other concerns, a thought emerged.  Could the ‘phase-shift’ have been the eject command?  Had his signal partially gone through?  But that wouldn’t explain how the Doctor saw.  If the Master had faded from existence due to the eject command, then the Doctor should have done the same simultaneously. 

 

The only possible solution was that the entity blocking his signal to the eject device and tampering with his mind had also attempted to eradicate him.  Fascinating.  Apparently he was a variable their enemy hadn’t factored into his plot.

 

The Doctor stood, waiting to hear an answer to his question.  He did know that the Master was withholding information, but the problem was that the Doctor would want a reason why the Master had sensed the other mind’s presence when he had not.  And since all of the Master’s suspicions about the other mind were based on information gleaned due to a failure in the eject command . . .

 

It was problematic, to be sure.  It was possible to evade reasons behind his suspicions, or even lie about them.  It was also possible he might gain something.  “And if I am withholding something?” he asked, looking out over the desert and feigning nonchalance.  “Why should I share that knowledge with you?”

 

“Because any death would cause a cascade failure in the mind-bender.  One dies and we all die.”  The Doctor’s fingers brushed at his temple without waiting for a response.  “May I?”

 

The Master spun and slapped away the greedy hand.  He had been so consumed with how to maneuver the Doctor into an exchange of information that he hadn’t considered the Doctor might simply want to enter his mind and take his knowledge.  He found himself off-balance, reacting with emotion rather than logic.  He couldn’t allow the contact.  He refused to give away that last shred of dignity.  “Don’t,” he snapped. 

 

The Doctor growled his frustration.  “I have to know!”

 

“Contrary to what you may think, you don’t have to know everything.” 

 

They faced off.  They didn’t need to say anything, because it had all been considered already.  Or had it?  The Doctor was shifting his weight, all flustered impatience.  Courtesy and time-honored tradition forbade him to enter another’s thoughts without permission, but from the look in his eyes, courtesy and time-honored tradition were moving lower and lower on his list of priorities.  Not that he could succeed.  Even this Doctor, whose mental powers were far greater than his predecessors, couldn’t hope to breach the barriers the Master had erected around his mind.  Not even fueled by his apparently mounting desperation.

 

But then again, if the Master suppressed the automatic revulsion opening his mind conjured he had to admit that there would be certain advantages.  Such a communion would cut both ways.  And the more he considered his options . . . perhaps he was merely mirroring the Doctor’s desire, but the Master had the sudden and intense urge to peer into his nemesis’ mind.  Not for information which would prove useful in this particular situation; he was thinking of the bigger picture.  He remembered his initial plan to use the girl’s mind to gain access to the Doctor’s secrets.  This was so much more convenient and so much more reliable coming straight from the source.  And the best part was that the Doctor wouldn’t fight him.  He was practically offering up his mind on a silver platter. 

 

Was such potential information worth the breach of his own mind?  The Master decided it was.  No game was won without calculated risk.

 

Not that he wouldn’t make this as uncomfortable for the Doctor as possible.  “Would you really do it?” he asked. “Would you force your way into my mind without my leave?”

 

The Doctor looked away and hunched his shoulders against the Master’s words.  He never could face his own capacity for darkness.  He forced a single word between clenched teeth.  “Yes.”

 

Interesting.  “You couldn’t get past my blocks.”

 

The Doctor lifted his chin, and his pain and self-loathing fell away.  “Yes,” he said, “I could.”  

 

The Master felt his certainty waver.  He had centuries of practice on the Doctor, and yet there was something in that flat, cold gaze that made him question his assessment of the Doctor’s mental capabilities.  He gave a lazy, pleasant smile to cover his doubt and disquiet.  “Very well, then, Doctor.  I’ll play your game.”  He let his smile grow pointed, allowing physical implication to do what words could not. 

 

The reaction was immediate.  The Doctor faded back to the man the Master had known for centuries and peered at him, trying to discern his secrets and intentions.  He wasn’t worried the Doctor would turn him down.  If anything, the implication of greater danger would only tempt the Doctor more.  His curiosity always got the better of him.  It was just a matter of time. 

 

Twenty-three seconds to be exact.  “Block off anything you don’t want me to see.  I won’t touch it,” the Doctor said.

 

“And if it’s tangled in what you want to know?”

 

Something flashed across the Doctor’s face.  Some decision he had made or conclusion he had come to.  He straightened and looked the Master in the eye, and a faint smirk played around the corners of his mouth.  “You’re the engineer,” he said.  “Separate out the parts.”

 

The Master began sorting out the answers he would seek.  Of paramount importance, he needed to know what had prompted this ruthlessness and if it was likely to recur in future regenerations.  He also wanted to know how the Doctor could be as icy as he had implied and still have such a devotion to the human.  To have such detachment and such attachment at once seemed strange.  Either the Doctor had somehow reconciled two opposite states, which seemed unlikely, or they were somehow connected.  If that was the case . . . the Master was disturbed by the notion.  It implied an emotional complexity and competence one didn’t expect in a Gallifreyan, and if the Doctor had developed such an aberration, he could be utterly unpredictable, not to mention dangerous.

 

If the Doctor was so consumed by emotion, the Master had to be ready.  He drew a deep breath and secured all his mental blocks.  He couldn’t touch such emotional illness without some kind of protection, and even if he was wrong it was better to be safe than discover too late that the Doctor’s sentiments were contagious.  When he was sure he could do no more, he gave a tight nod of acquiescence.

 

The two Time Lords reached out.  The Master’s hand connected a fraction of a second sooner and he threw up every wall and mental obstacle he could.  He attempted to get into the Doctor’s mind, but found it similarly barred.  He was forced to make an emergency reassessment of the Doctor’s increase in mental abilities.  Frustration and admiration in equal parts welled in him.

 

He felt the bite of the Doctor’s fingers against his temple.  Without intending to, he whispered, “Contact,” and the Doctor’s voice echoed his own.

 

For a second, neither of them lowered their defenses.  Finally they recognized the futility and came to a mutual accord.   Their walls crumbed simultaneously.  The Master meant to rebuild his again before the Doctor could enter, but when he tried to do so he found his mental blocks wedged open, and not by the Doctor.  He knew the feel of the Doctor’s mind, and this was something else.  He’d felt this when he’d looked in the mirror.

 

And then he was immersed in the Doctor’s thoughts.  They swirled around him, brilliant in their intensity.  There were so many minds within this one mind, and each had memories bubbling up.  The Master attempted to find some common thread, some order, anything which might be used to his advantage at a later date, but he couldn’t keep his grip on anything for a long enough period of time. 

 

He remembered—not his memory—listening to the words of a much older, wiser Time Lord: the only way to succeed was to face his greatest fear.

 

His greatest fear.  He could still see the spider and feel the pain as he absorbed a lethal dose of radiation.  He remembered shaking, but not in fear of _her_.  She was as good as dead before he had arrived.  No, he shook as he stared down oblivion.  He shook as he remembered his last death.  The pain and the fear and the loss.  The terrible loss. 

 

He remembered the look on Sarah Jane’s face when he died. 

 

Where there’s life there’s . . .

 

And then the memory was gone, whipped away on some mental gale, leaving the Master shaken by emotions which weren’t his; haunted by faces he’d never seen.

 

And he moved on, the sense of loss pulling in a new memory.  He experienced grief he had never felt.  He saw his companions die.  Katarina first, then Adric, then different faces blending into one another, but all killed because of his misjudgment.  And in the end they all looked like Ace.  His dear Ace . . .

 

He was losing her.  Every second he spent trying to unravel the mystery was another second in which she drifted a little further away from him.  Already the bond was stretched to breaking.  There was something interfering with the signal . . .

 

The signal from the detonator.  A bomb blowing a formerly pristine white façade open.  No one inside.  No one harmed.  He’d been told it would be the perfect plan, the perfect diversion, but nothing in his sequestered academic life had prepared him for this.  He’d been staggered by the blast, and the sound of it had silenced the rest of the world.  He’d stood, staring at the destruction with his mouth hanging open, Susan at his side.  Her mouth had moved, but he hadn’t been able to hear what she was saying.  Not over the deafening silence.

 

He had stared at white rubble strewn across a perfectly manicured lawn and wondered if this was the life he had just consigned himself to.  It felt almost like a harbinger.  As though, despite all his training and upbringing, he would grow accustomed to destruction, pain and terror.  The horror of these things would fade, just as the ringing in his ears faded.

 

And as the ringing faded, he heard the shout from his dearest friend.  “Go, Theta!  Go now!”

 

And the Master stared at himself standing with the detonator in his hand and his robes flapping around him.  It was his eleventh body.  Raven dark hair and strangely pale eyes gleaming with glee at the destruction.  He didn’t look shocked.  He had been traveling the galaxy for hundreds of years at that point, had already seen so much and had run through his lives so quickly—only learning caution when he began to run out of regenerations—so he already knew about ruin.  He knew it intimately enough that he seemed to revel in it.

 

And then both of them turned in opposite directions and fled, he with Susan at his side.  Koschei, of course, had his own arrangements made.  He had said he had no desire to be exiled, although if that was what Theta wanted, he was willing to help. 

 

With the destruction of the building, there would be no one guarding the courtyard.  They would never have another chance.  As the dust choked the air, he and Susan sprinted the last distance and skidded to a halt in the courtyard.  There, standing like providence, were the rows of unused, unclaimed TARDISes.

 

The Master’s mind shook against the onslaught of memories.  Distantly, he felt the Doctor’s do the same.  Their well-crafted boundaries were breaking down.  All the things neither of them wanted known were being laid bare. 

 

But worse, even, than this . . . ah, there it was.  He finally sensed it!  A third mind interfacing with theirs.  The same mind which had blocked the eject command.  It was an unanticipated, destabilizing variable standing out even in the chaos of this mindscape within a mindscape.

 

Obtaining information was no longer an option.  If he faltered even a second in his struggle against the invading mind, he could lose himself.  Even if he didn’t falter, he might lose . . .

 

And for an instant, there was no Master.  Nothing to distinguish him from the Doctor.  They were too alike to discern.  Their lives had so many parallels already.  What was one last confluence of reality and mentality?

 

No!  He was the Master of Minds, and he would not allow some second-rate parasite to override his sense of self.  Especially if it meant collapsing his consciousness into that of the Doctor.  Contact had to be broken.  It would be excruciating, but that was a price he was more than willing to pay.  The Master jerked his hands up and away from the Doctor’s face, simultaneously breaking his end of the connection and knocking the hands away from his own head. 

 

They collapsed, both of them sprawled and dazed, the sudden loss of contact a sucking wound.  The Master felt the inevitable shaking seize him, and he kept his jaw clamped to avoid biting his own tongue.  The pain, as he had anticipated, was horrific.

 

And then it ebbed.  His mind filled in what had been lost and the physical reaction lessened.

 

“Something else . . .” the Doctor croaked.  They both knew what he was talking about.

 

“It’s far more powerful than it has any right to be.”  The Master stared up at the leafless branches.  They looked like claws tearing the sky.  “Why would something of this magnitude hide in such a tiny mind?”

 

There was no response.  He tested his arms and found that they would move, albeit with some protest.  His legs were less cooperative, but he gave them no option other than full compliance so they did as he commanded.

 

He sat up at the same time as the Doctor.  He tried to understand what he had seen in the Doctor’s mind, but to no avail.  He didn’t have time for a thorough analysis and interpretation, and in any case, the necessary objectivity was currently eluding him.

 

The Doctor also seemed preoccupied with processing his experience.  Was he trying to understand their new adversary?  Or was he doing what the Master was and attempting to determine some semblance of order and sense in the memories he had stolen?  Which secrets had the Doctor divined?  The Master felt a sense of dread.  There were some secrets he wasn’t willing to admit to himself.

 

“Eject command,” the Doctor said.

 

The Master sighed.  A mindful of secrets more horrific and wonderful than anything the Doctor could dream, and he latched on to that.  So depressingly typical.  “Oh,” he said.

 

“You created an eject command.”  There was something dangerous in that low, precise tone.  The Master felt himself tense.  He had not considered that secret significant, not in the grand scheme.  But the Doctor disagreed.  “You were ready to pull us out of the program whenever you felt threatened.”

 

The Master considered his answers and his options.  Lying was futile because the Doctor had his information as firsthand as it could possibly be. Expressing surprise that his duplicity had not been anticipated and thwarted would be somewhat like asking the Doctor to share the blame, which was neither dignified nor necessary.  In the end, it seemed wisest simply to tell the truth.  The Master suspected his habitual eloquence would not be tolerated.

 

“Yes,” he said.

 

“And Ace?  What about Ace?”

 

“The disruption of the program would have sent a massive spike of white noise to her mind.”  He sensed the anguish which was the Doctor’s and his mouth twisted in distaste.  He had no use for anguish or regret, no matter how poignantly felt.  It was not his, and any indicator otherwise was merely an aftereffect of their mental contact.  The human was average.  She meant nothing. 

 

“She would have died,” the Doctor said.

 

“She would have died.”  The confirmation was bare and simple.  The facts had been presented.  No scientist could do more to defend his work.

 

The look the Doctor gave him—disbelief and fury and something else the Master couldn’t identify—cut him more deeply than it should have.  “And I would have thought it was an accident, wouldn’t I?” the Doctor asked, his voice so terribly calm. 

 

The Doctor wouldn’t kill him, certainly, as his death meant the death of the Doctor’s human, but there were other things the Doctor could do.  If they escaped, he could follow through on his threat.  He could still dump the Master on an uninhabited planet to rot.  His voice was a dry whisper when he said, “Yes.”

 

The Doctor released his breath in one explosion of air.  “I can’t believe I trusted you.”

 

The Master drew himself up, unwilling to appear cowed.  “Frankly, my dear Doctor,” he said, “neither can I.”

 

The Doctor nodded.  There was an understanding between them, bitter though it may be.  There was no trust, but there was need.  They were lost in a mental wilderness, and they had to find their way out.  The eject command had failed, so they had to go through all the steps.  The structure of a mind-bender allowed an exit only when the objective had been reached. 

 

So that was what they had to do.  When collaboration was necessary, the Doctor could at least count on the Master’s sense of self-preservation.  In the mindscape, self-preservation depended on him protecting the Doctor, so he would.

 

The Master took the mirror in his hand and slipped it into an inner pocket in his suit jacket.  The Doctor gave a curt nod and they both rose without aid from the other.

 

“What now?” the Master asked, his tone harsh, ringing through the still air.

 

The Doctor nodded out at the desert.  “_That_ is our destination.”

 

The Master snorted.  “There’s a flaw in your plan.”  The Doctor shot him a cold look.  The Master nodded out at the vista, a mockery of the Doctor’s own gesture.  “We lack something which might be necessary to our progress.  A way down, for example.”  He cast a contemptuous glance over the Doctor.  “Unless you have a rare talent for scaling cliffs I’ve somehow missed.”

 

The Doctor lifted his chin.  “Do you know what your problem is?” he asked.

 

“Enlighten me.”

 

“You’re a literalist in a situation in which nothing is as it seems.”  The Doctor bent and picked up his umbrella.  “This whole world is created by our minds.  Therefore, if we believe something, it’s true.  If I believed strongly enough that the sky was orange, it would change that color.  And, if I believe that this umbrella is just as good as a parachute, it will be.”  He opened the umbrella with a snap.  “All you have to do is hold on.”

 

The Doctor swung the umbrella in an arc until it hung above his head, shading him from the glare.  He strolled over to the edge of the abyss and looked out.  Even after his smug proclamations, the Master noted that the Doctor wasn’t looking down. 

 

“This is madness,” the Master said.  “It’s just a hypothesis!  Are you willing to die for a wild guess?”

 

“As you so charitably pointed out, you’re an engineer.  Metaphysics were always lost on you.  I’ve seen enough to know that every universe has rules, and if you treat this space as its own universe . . .”

 

“Then an umbrella is a parachute if you can will it to be so,” the Master concluded for him.  He stepped forward because he could not go back.  They had to proceed if they wished to escape.  He took hold of the handle both above and below the Doctor’s grip.

 

The Doctor looked up and met his eyes.  A smile flashed across his features.  “Besides,” the Doctor said, “if I’m wrong, we won’t live to regret it.”

 

And he stepped off the edge, dragging the Master along with him.  They dropped like stones.


	8. Subsume

There was something wrong with the castle.  For one thing, there was nothing within the structure itself.  It was just a mask.  A cover for the descending passageway.  The Doctor led Dorothy through the semi-dark, and she couldn’t help but be disappointed.

 

She’d hoped for a castle.

 

\--A flash of a face in a portrait: a girl in a yellow dress.  Not is or was but would be.—

 

Dorothy shook her head, wondering at her stray thoughts.  Had she always been so inattentive?  The Doctor might have said something important.  Not that he was talking much.  He hadn’t really said anything to her since they had started down the passageway.

 

She’d hoped for a castle.  Had she already thought that?  She tried, but she couldn’t recall the last time she’d been in a castle.  She knew she had been, but it wasn’t there in her mind.  Dorothy wondered why everything was so foggy.

 

—Geronimo!—

 

Dorothy’s steps faltered, but only slightly.  What a strange word to think.  What did it mean?  Had she made it up?  Was she playing a game with herself?

 

—I’m playing poker . . .—

 

No she wasn’t, but the words lingered in her mind, teasing her.  She had to swerve to avoid running into a sandstone outcropping.  The Doctor gave her a look of disapproval and Dorothy hung her head in shame.

 

Only the Doctor could make her feel so small, so vulnerable.  It was as though her whole world hung on what he thought.  She had to be perfect.  She had to make him proud.  Other things used to make him proud—courage, integrity, stubborn independence and compassion—but things changed.  The Doctor needed something else.  Dorothy was . . . Dorothy was . . . Dorothy . . .

 

—and I’ve got an Ace up my sleeve!—

 

An Ace up his sleeve?  An Ace.  Dorothy knew that word.  Dorothy knew . . .

 

Ace.

 

Ace swung around and punched the imposter square in his lying jaw.

 

He stumbled back, and his eyes blazed in fury.  Ace, for once heeding that little voice of caution in her head, ran.  She couldn’t head back up to the surface because the imposter was standing in the way.  She plunged deeper into the earth, hoping there might be somewhere to double back.  She had to get out.  She had to find a way of warning the Doctor that something else was in her head, and it was a lot worse than a cheetah virus.

 

She squeezed through a narrow between two outcroppings of sandstone.  The impractical red gown she wore caught and snagged its delicate fabric on the surfaces.  She glanced down at it, confused.  Why was she still wearing it?  If she appeared as her mental image she should be back in her regular get-up, not some impractical frock.  Concentrate as she might, though, the dress remained. 

 

Then a hand closed around her arm and she turned to see the imposter, his face twisted in malice, trying to haul her back.  Ace flailed and broke his hold for the second it took to squirm through and keep running.

 

The ceiling started to descend.  At first Ace didn’t even notice, but when she hit her head on a low-hanging rock she had to stoop to continue.  In a few steps she was bending forward further, shuffling as fast as she could.  By the time she was bent double she heard the pound of the imposter’s footsteps behind her.  Ace crouched low, trying to accommodate the diminishing tunnel, but when that didn’t allow her to be as quick as she needed she threw herself to her hands and knees and crawled as fast as she could over the uneven rocks.  Her knees protested and her hands ached, but she heard that relentless pursuit and crawled all the faster.

 

The ceiling continued to become lower and lower until she was crawling on her belly and pulling herself along by bumps in the floor.

 

She saw an opening ahead.  The light was brighter, and she couldn’t see the descending ceiling.  She belly-crawled forward, fingers reaching and scrabbling for purchase, feet kicking at the dirt.

 

A hand slammed down on Ace’s ankle.  Her head whipped around and she gaped at the imposter who held her tight enough that her foot started to tingle.  She concentrated on her boots, trying to will them into being and give her some protection against the crushing grip, but something blocked her attempts.  It felt as though the castle was pressing down on her.  A thousand tons of hard-packed dust squashing her flat.

 

She gave up on her boots and fought, kicking back as hard as she could and trying to squirm away.  Her foot scrabbled against the imposter’s hand for several seconds before she finally managed a clear shot and felt her heel slam into his face.  He didn’t relent, so she kicked him again and again until his grip loosened.  She shot forward, scuttling out of range and coming to her feet as the tunnel widened again. 

 

Ace ran, panting with exertion and fear.  That thing had got inside her head and convinced her that it was the Doctor.  Her Doctor!  If it could do that so fast and with such subtlety that she didn’t even notice it happening, Ace didn’t stand a chance.  She had to get away.  She had no Nitro, no weapons.

 

No, that wasn’t right.  What was the Doctor always telling her?  Her greatest weapon was the stuff between her ears.  She had to think her way out of the situation.  The imposter had one up on her, separating her from the cat.  She’d played a move and he’d countered.  Now the ball was in her court and she’d do some countering of her own.  She just had to stay one step ahead.  She could do this.  The key was figuring out his strengths and weaknesses.

 

Ace scrambled into a vast chamber, and her hand came up to shield her eyes as the light suddenly intensified a hundred-fold.  The chamber’s ceiling was suspended high above her by several natural arches which stretched from the floor all the way up the walls, and then across the domed ceiling to a central node.  It reminded her of some crude replica of Westminster Abbey.  The walls were relatively smooth, the sandstone rippling in its vertical columns.  In the center of the room was a dais of sorts.  The circular, smooth platform of stone seemed out of place in such a natural setting.  Every other facet of the chamber was formed by natural processes, but the dais was not nature’s handiwork. 

 

She cast about for something suitably martial, but the best she found was a largish rock.  She picked it up and hurried to the dais, eager to claim the high ground, even if it only put her up six inches.

 

A long crack ran down the length of the dais.  As Ace approached it she realized it wasn’t a crack, but a chasm barely a foot wide.  The light from the cavern stretched several yards down into it, and then became dim glimmers off deeper walls.  Ace, keeping one eye on the entrance to the chamber, held a cautious hand over the crack.  A small breeze blew against her fingers.

 

She leaned over the chasm and inhaled.  The effect was immediate.  She reeled back as the smell of something at once sharp and sweet struck her and her senses reeled.  She staggered back, her vision swimming.

 

A hand came down on her shoulder.  “A bit much for you, darling Dorothy?” came that voice, equal parts loved and loathed.  She had to use her head, but her mind was garbled by the breeze.  Plus, the monster was in her head.  It was a fair bet it could read her thoughts.  How was she supposed to plan if the imposter could anticipate her moves? 

 

So Ace’s head told her not to think.  The only thing the imposter couldn’t foresee was unplanned action.  That was the only solution. 

 

Ace didn’t stop and didn’t hesitate.  She whirled around, brought the rock up and hit the imposter as hard as she could against the side of the head.  The impact was enough to send him sprawling, even if the rock didn’t so much as break skin.

 

With inhuman grace, the imposter rolled as he hit the ground, coming to his hands and knees.  His head pivoted around to glare at her, and his eyes—

 

And then Ace understood everything.  She knew what he was and why he was there.  She backed away, holding her rock at the ready.  She knew her enemy.  She knew taunts would work. 

 

“Come on,” she whispered.  “Come and get me.”

 

So he did.  He moved faster than anything she’d ever met and Ace stumbled backwards, trying to get a good shot in with her rock.  Everything seemed to be going along correctly.  She had a target acquired, she was in the right range, she’d even started her swing when she tripped over the step down from the dais and overbalanced.  For a split-second she thought she could stay vertical, but then she tipped over.  She hit the floor on her back, and the impact smashed her knuckles between the rock and the ground.  Her arm spasmed in pain and the rock skittered away.

 

Ace rolled over and scrambled after her only weapon.  The hand was back on her shoulder, and there was nothing gentle about the way he flipped her onto her back.  His other arm came down across her upper chest, pinning her in place.  Ace thrashed and tried to dislodge him, but he was immovable.  The imposter lifted the hand he had used to flip her over and it glided toward her face.  Ace felt a jolt of panic and bucked as hard as she could.  She felt his weight shift and she freed an arm.  She couldn’t reach the rock, so she punched him across the jaw as hard as she could. 

 

The second time around was not as effective as the first.  He growled and grabbed her wrist, slamming her hand down with enough force to break bone.  Ace felt her vision white out with the pain.

 

And in that blinding white she caught a glimpse of something in photo-negative.  Two men on the edge of the desert, the scrubland around them giving way to dust and dead grass.  One was unidentifiable yet familiar, while the other . . .

 

The Doctor was there, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure if he was real or if her brain was clinging to some last glimmer of hope.  At that point she really didn’t care.  Even a false hope was better than no hope at all, so she grasped it tight and focused on it, trying to blot out the pain, trying to come up with a plan.  Alone she couldn’t hope to defeat the imposter, but the Doctor was clever.  He would have a plan—as he always did—and Ace would carry it through.  That was the essence of their partnership: a perfect combination of intellect and explosives.

 

It was this thought which she sent towards the mental image of the Doctor.  She recalled in sharp detail the exact smell of Nitro-Nine.  It was distinctive, powerful, enough to burn the nose if she wasn’t careful.  She thought that smell at him.  He started to run.

 

“Yes!” she gasped.

 

And then the hand was on her temple, and the thought splintered into a million fragments.  Ace smelled dust and her eyes snapped open.

 

The imposter’s gaze bored into hers and his voice was horribly level as he said, “I imagine you’ve seen your Doctor control other people’s minds.  Have you ever been afraid he’d do the same to you?”

 

Ace let out a noise of protest.  The imposter started his assault.  Ace clawed at his face, trying to do him enough damage that his concentration broke.  Nothing changed.  Ace felt the edges of her mind go numb.  It was strange because she’d never considered her mind a thing which could feel physical sensations, but it was as though a sheet of ice hardened over peripheral thoughts, trapping them as the cold permeated and obliterated them altogether. 

 

Ace forgot her birthday and her middle name.  She forgot what she’d got for Christmas the year before she left Earth, and then forgot Christmas in its entirety.  She forgot her mother and the time storm.  She forgot Manisha.  She forgot her chemistry set.  She forgot her entire life before the Doctor.

 

She clung to every memory of him like a lifeline.  She had to hold on.  She had to be ready when he got there so she could do her part.  The Doctor wasn’t going to be able to save them alone.

 

She forgot Iceworld and their first meeting.

 

Distantly she felt scalding tears running down her cheeks.  She squeezed her eyes closed to staunch the flow.  Her short nails dug at the imposter’s skin but couldn’t tear it.  She kicked at him, but the angle was wrong and she couldn’t get enough momentum to do damage.

 

She forgot the Daleks.

 

Ace gave up trying to hurt the imposter and merely tried to pry his fingers from her face.  She couldn’t lose anything more.

 

She forgot candyfloss hair and Susan Q’s sad eyes.

 

She bent one of his fingers backwards.  She pushed as hard as she could, trying to break it, but it curled against her and made contact again.  The assault was stronger, faster.

 

She forgot Cybermen and catapults.  She forgot Nemesis and Lady Peinforte’s penetrating stare.  She forgot evil clowns and Bellboy and Mags.  She forgot Shou Yuing and Excalibur and Arthur and Morgaine and the graveyard stench of nuclear missiles.  She forgot that Aces were rare.

 

And she knew she had lost.  She wasn’t going to last long enough for the Doctor to reach her.  She was going to die, and worse, her death would probably kill him.  The only hope was the wild card: the unknown man.  He was a factor she knew nothing about, and if she knew nothing then the imposter might not know him either.  Ace forced her eyes open.  She wasn’t dying with her eyes closed. 

 

She forgot Light and Control and Josiah Samuel Smith and all the horrors in Gabriel Chase.  She forgot bus stations and cruelty and unrequited love.  She forgot burnt toast.

 

The imposter was wearing a pitiless smile as he took her life.  He was absorbing all her experiences, and she couldn’t stop him.  She just hoped he couldn’t use her memories against the Doctor.

 

She forgot her grandmother and her infant mother.  She forgot haemovores and Sorin and the Ancient One and Colonel Millington and Reverend Wainwright.  She forgot betrayal and dangerous undercurrents.

 

She forgot her friends and the Cheetah planet.  She forgot Kara.  She forgot Perivale.  She forgot the Master.

 

“He’ll beat you,” she said, her voice hoarse but still resolute.  “He’s more clever than you can ever imagine, you toerag.”

 

She forgot the Doctor holding her close after she broke from the virus’ control.  She forgot his arm around her shoulder as they walked away from the battle.  She forgot cities made of song and tea getting cold.  She forgot they had work to do.

 

Desperately, she focused on a single thought, so inconsequential that the imposter might ignore it.  She concentrated on the yellow cubes flying out of the food machine.  Yellow cubes, she thought.  She sent the thought at the Doctor, unsure of whether or not it got through.

 

“Yellow cube,” she whispered.  “Yellow cube.”

 

She forgot the Doctor.

 

She forgot herself.

 


	9. Falling AAAARGH!

The Master felt that sickening rush of falling and squeezed his eyes closed.  For a second, he was absurdly grateful that his lungs had seized up in the paroxysm which gripped the body when it plummeted.  It saved his dignity by preventing any potential scream.  He clung to the handle of the Doctor’s umbrella and berated himself for doing something so monumentally stupid as trusting the Doctor over gravity.  Physics was physics!  It was stupid to think it would be different in a mindscape he helped create. 

 

The Doctor was saying something, but the words were torn away in the screech of passing air.  The Master didn’t care, anyway.  He had no need to hear whatever witty rejoinder the Doctor was trying to interject in the seconds before they shattered on impact.

 

Though from the strained look on the Doctor’s face, he was more likely to be begging the Guardians for help than making quips.  The Master looked away, not wanting to see the Doctor so lost.  He stared at the side of the mountain.  He could see patterns in the rock, flashes of familiarity like the memories within the Doctor’s mind.  _Were_ the patterns in the rock memories, and if so, whose?  The girl’s?  Cultural memories of the cheetah virus?  The other mind’s?  Whichever it was, they seemed to be gaining solidity.  They no longer flashed by so quickly as to be incomprehensible but . . . there.  That was exactly the right speed!  For a second, the Master began to understand what was really happening in the mindscape and the overwhelming sense of revelation smothered even his sense of impending doom.  Of course!  It was all so perfectly obvious.

 

But then they slowed too much, and the images were gone.  It had all been an illusion brought about by a panicking mind.  The stones were merely different colors of a reddish-brown sandstone molded into suggestive shapes by water flowing in the same rivulets for hundreds of years.  A natural phenomenon.  No more meaningful than reading viscera or casting bones.

 

Then the Master realized that he was considering sandstone.  For long seconds he had been considering _sandstone_.  Seconds in which he should have shattered on the rocks below.  Instead of speeding past him on his way to oblivion, the sandstone was meandering past at a speed completely at odds with gravity. 

 

His head swiveled around and he stared at the Doctor, whose eyes were still locked on some faraway point.  His expression was no longer lost.  He was calm, his flow of words spoken in measured cadences.  Their fall slowed further, and the Master listened.

 

Old High Gallifreyan wasn’t something he was used to hearing.  After so many years away from his home, he was struck by nostalgia so strong it was almost painful.  Lilting, haunting syllables tripping over one another, each syllable striking the correct pitch.  Syntax categorized the sentences as imperative, and the use of the potential verb tense as opposed to the factual . . .

 

The Laws of Time.  The Doctor was reciting the Laws of Time.  Their eyes met, and the Master understood what was required of him.  He didn’t know why, but he could demand answers when they didn’t run the risk of plummeting to their deaths.  Stumbling over the words as his tongue recalled the formation of the oldest dialect in his language, the Master recited along with the Doctor. 

 

It was strange, but all the laws—even those that seemed ridiculous or hypocritical—took on a veneration of sorts when spoken in Old High Gallifreyan.  Together they recited.  The Master barely even stumbled over the laws concerning regeneration, and as far as he had strayed from the Gallifreyan fold, he still believed in the first Law of Time.  Every utterance of it slowed them just a little more.  He gave up on the others and concentrated on the first law, reciting it over and over. 

 

Their plummet slowed to the point at which they weren’t risking even minor damage when they touched down.  They fluttered like a scrap of paper, drifting through the air until their feet touched the dust.

The Master let go of the umbrella and staggered back on legs that felt as though they had been replaced by trunks fabricated from blancmange.  The Doctor rested the umbrella on his shoulder and twirled it, a smile of immense superiority on his face.  His legs were stone-steady.

 

“What was that?” the Master demanded, feeling more than a little scandalized.  Had the Doctor known?  Had he let them fall just to get a rise of the Master?

 

The Doctor gestured up at the ledge with the umbrella.  “The physics of belief.  In this place, you can take a belief, channel it, and shape the world to your desires.”

 

“How did you know?  You wouldn’t have taken that risk if you didn’t.”

 

“I had a hunch.”  The Doctor scanned the desert, looking for something, although the Master couldn’t guess what.  “I’ve got a lot of hunches about this place, all leading me to one very nasty conclusion.”

 

The Master’s impatience flared.  After nearly dying, the least he deserved was to be kept informed!  If the Doctor had theories or a sense of logic about this place, the Master needed to know.  The Doctor’s plans often disregarded little things like survival.  “Yes?” he snapped.

 

The Doctor touched his index finger to his lips and started walking.  The Master glared at his back, thought about staying where he was to prove a point, but then he fell into step.  It was either that or let the Doctor face danger alone, with whatever dubious precautions he might take.  That was unacceptable. 

 

They plunged into the scrub outskirts of the desert.  Small, stunted trees twisted their way out of the ground, their branches forming symbols.  The Master thought he saw the Prydonian insignia in the distance, but it was only a flash.  Amongst the trees, short shrubs grew low to the ground.

 

As they continued on, the trees thinned out and scrub predominated the landscape, punctuated by dead grass.  The blades looked sharp, and the Master moved to avoid them.  He could see, further out, that even the scrub ceased to encroach on the desert, leaving nothing but patches of grass and dust.

 

Then he saw a shape slinking through the shrubs, making its way towards them.  He held up a hand and jerked his chin in the direction of the shape.  The two Time Lords stopped and waited.

 

There was a scent.  Familiar, wild and predatory.  The Master’s body tensed.  This was what they had originally come to find, so he didn’t know why he was surprised. The unknown intelligence must have distracted him.  He glanced at the Doctor, whose head was cocked to the side as though listening to something.  He hadn’t detected it yet.  He didn’t have the Master’s . . . sensitivity. 

 

“You won’t hear it coming,” the Master said.  “A poor pathogen it would be if its footprints were obvious.”

 

The Doctor closed his eyes and smiled.  “Ah.  The elusive cheetah virus, I take it.”

 

It stepped out from behind a shrub some distance away and seemed to shimmer into existence out of the heat waves rising off the desert plain.  Its coat was the pale tan universal to the desert, but the color was speckled in darkness.  Its eyes were huge, knowing yellow orbs.  Those eyes looked at the Master and recognized him.

 

The virus halted its progress, staring at him, unblinking.  Somewhere in his mind, the Master felt a stir of response from his own subdued virus.  He felt the fear of relapse.  He had only defeated the virus the first time by a small margin, drawing upon physiological immunity and an iron will.

 

“You don’t want me,” the Master said.  “I’m already infected.  You want the girl.”

 

“Don’t—” the Doctor started, but the Master cut him off with a raised hand.

 

“Why aren’t you with her?” he asked.

 

The Doctor paused, his eyes flashing back and forth between the Master and the virus.  When he spoke again, his voice was soft with realization.  “The other mind is interfering . . .”  His gaze met the Master’s, and it was obvious he finally understood all the implications of the situation.  “It’s not the virus manifesting symptoms in Ace, it’s the other intelligence masking its activities through a known ailment.  Hmm.” He stepped forward, head down and eyes dark with thought.  He walked to the virus, crouched down, reached out and touched its face.  It growled, but it was a weak, pathetic noise.  “You’ve been run ragged, haven’t you?”

 

The Master edged closer.  “And if the other presence is defeated?”  The virus raised its head and met his eyes.  The Master understood.  “No recuperating.”  He looked down at the Doctor, who remained crouched before the cat.  “The virus you sought to expel from your human is beaten already.  The other presence has bolstered her immune system, but she’s had the time to build her own by now.  I should have guessed.”  He closed his eyes as comprehension rushed over him.  “I _knew_ she couldn’t have lasted as long as she did.” 

 

He opened his eyes.  The Doctor’s flat gaze dared him to state the obvious.  So he did.  “Your human should be covered in fur and ripping your throat out as we speak, Doctor.”

 

The Doctor’s façade of superiority was wrenched away in that moment.  He stared off at a point in the middle distance and he looked hollow.  “I told her it wouldn’t be an issue.  Not for years.  And even when . . . I thought she staved it off.  She tried to save me.” 

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Her coma was self-induced,” the Doctor said, as though reciting a prescripted speech.  “She attacked me, but she stopped.  I tried to talk to her, but she ran away before I could say anything.  I found her in the med-bay, overdosed on tranquilizers.”  His breath hitched.  “It took four and a half minutes to restart her heart.”

 

“Ah.”  The so-called noble virtue of self-sacrifice.  The Master shook his head, a bit contemptuous and more than a little amused.  “Humans are such fragile things, aren’t they?”

 

“I thought I’d found a way to save her.”  The Doctor didn’t even acknowledge the Master.  He covered his mouth with a hand and heaved a sigh between his fingers.  “In reality, the only thing that saved her . . . oh, it would be ironic if it weren’t so terrible.”

 

The Master shifted, not wanting to see this.  When the Doctor didn’t seem inclined to do anything but crouch before the defeated virus and wallow in self-recrimination, the Master caught him by the elbow and pulled him to his feet.  “I have no intention of dying here, and we have to save your human to leave this place, so blame yourself on your own time, Doctor.  We have work to do.”

 

The Doctor drew himself up and gave a sharp nod.  The Master saw the haunted look in the Doctor’s eyes flicker and wink out as he shut off his useless emotions.  Then he stepped back and turned to the virus.  “Have you seen her?”

 

A slow blink of confirmation.

 

“Take us there.”

 

The virus rose and padded away.  The two Time Lords glanced at one another, then followed.

 

The wind blew in hot off the desert, carrying scents like memories.  Perhaps they _were_ memories.  There was a burst of something floral, heavy and sweet, and the Master thought of the gardens surrounding the Panopticon.  Then he smelled something sharply chemical.  It prickled in his nose, conjuring the image of fire in his mind.

 

The Doctor ran forward, following the scent.  He overtook and then outpaced the virus. “This way!” he shouted.

 

“What?” the Master demanded.

 

“Nitro-nine!”

 

The phrase made no sense to him, but the Doctor was clearly on a trail.  The Master dashed after him and heard the virus do the same.  As the scrub all but disappeared and they entered the desert proper, his feet slipped and sank into the dust, and it kicked up.  The scent of chemicals faded as the hard-baked smell of powdered earth overpowered everything else.  The Doctor staggered to a halt, sniffing at the wind as a desperate look suffused his features.  They had lost the trail.

 

The dust slowly settled.  Something was wrong, though.  The Master could see the air clear around them, but the roar of the dust remained.  The Doctor’s gaze focused over his shoulder.  He blanched white and his eyes grew wide.  He pulled out a handkerchief with hands that shook.

 

The Master turned slowly, not really wanting to see the inevitable.  He expected a haze of rising dust, currents twisting in the wind.  He expected eddies and gaps in the oncoming storm.

 

He didn’t expect the wall of dust which hurtled toward them.

 

“Sandstorm,” he breathed.

 

“No,” the Doctor said.  “Look at the ground.” 

 

The Master glanced at the layer of powdery dust lying on top of more hard-packed earth.  He nudged it with the toe of his shoe, and even the small disturbance created a cloud.

 

The Doctor said, “It’s a dust storm.”

 

“Dust storm?”

 

“Much, much worse than a sandstorm.”  His voice became muffled, and the Master looked to see that he had covered the lower half of his face with the handkerchief.  “Cover your mouth and nose,” the Doctor said.  “You can’t inhale this!”  The Master whipped off his cravat and clapped the silk over his nose and mouth with seconds to spare. 

 

Then he was enveloped in the dust storm.  It roiled around him, and he could see only the vaguest outlines of the Doctor and the virus.  His eyes began to water, trying to purge the dust, and his vision faded further.  The dust was so fine it permeated his cravat and reached his nose.  He could smell it, and a few seconds later he could taste it in the back of his throat.  He pictured dust sliding down his trachea, coating all surfaces on its way to his lungs.  There, it would collect, filling him up until breath was impossible.

 

Anything was better than drowning in dirt, so the Master stopped breathing.  It wasn’t advisable to continue strenuous physical activity when one bypassed, but he couldn’t just wait for the storm to end.

 

The Doctor emerged suddenly from the blizzard of dust, close enough that he was somewhat distinct.  He groped for the Master’s hand, and then pulled him along through the storm.  The Master caught fleeting glimpses of the cat emerging from and disappearing back into the dust.  He didn’t know which way they were going, and he doubted the Doctor did either.

 

Then the Doctor stopped, turned, and looked at the Master.  His exact expression was too blurred to see, but the Master knew the Doctor had a plan. 

 

He started walking again, towing the Master in his wake.  The Master’s joints began to feel stiff and his skin felt tight from all the dust collecting on it.  His eyes were little more than slits covered by protective lashes.  His lungs were already protesting.  He could last hours without oxygen if he sat still and willed his heart rate to drop, but trudging against the wind through a dust storm was too much to ask even of Gallifreyan physiology.  He was going to need to take a breath, no matter how contaminated, relatively soon.

 

Then they emerged, the world shifting so abruptly that the Master staggered, squinting as the glaring blue sky reappeared overhead.  He drew a startled breath, and even through the taste of dust, the air seemed particularly sweet.  All around them the storm raged, but at this point, there was utter calm and unnatural silence. 

 

Not far away, the virus bounded from the wall of dust.  It stopped, shook itself and licked at its fur.

 

“Is this your doing?” the Master asked the Doctor.

 

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair.  He’d lost his hat in the storm, and his dark hair was now a pale tan.  In fact, the Doctor in his entirety was a pale tan, with the exception of his eyes, a shocking blue-gray against so much monotony.  The Doctor patted at his clothing, and small puffs of dust rose off.  The Master did the same, and then undid his cuffs to roll up his sleeves.  His arms, even covered by two layers of fabric, were coated in a fine layer of dust, brown speckles highlighting his pores.  The dust clung stubbornly, refusing to be brushed off.

 

The Doctor continued to pat the dust out of his clothing.  “I may not have been powerful enough to stop the storm once it was created, but I knew I could tweak a few aspects at least.  It was just a matter of one mind elaborating on what another thinks up.  Rather the purpose of this entire exercise, after all.”  He looked up from his work, and his smile was both impish and proud.  “So I made an eye in the storm.  A temporary solution, but a start, wouldn’t you say?”

 

The Master drew breath to argue, but it caught in the dust which he had inhaled, and he began to cough.  He tried to catch his breath, but found he couldn’t.  In fact, the coughing became harder, reverberating in his chest as he felt the first prickles of pain. 

 

He bent over, the spasms nearly knocking him prone.  He held a hand to his mouth and stringy globs of mud came up.  It was far more than he could have possibly inhaled!  The Doctor pounded on his back and the Master felt something inside him tear.  He retched and spat out what seemed, at first glance, to be a stone.  As it lay white on the ground, the Master realized it wasn’t stone, but whittled bone.

 

The Doctor’s face twisted in revulsion.  He kicked the bone and it skittered into the wall of dust where it was consumed by the storm.  “Do you think that’s funny?” he shouted at the sky.  Then, quietly, he asked, “Are you all right?”

 

 “I’ll be fine,” the Master said, ignoring his hoarse voice and the feeling of something having ripped open inside his body.  He coughed a little more, his hand to his face, and when he drew it away, it was speckled in crimson.

 

They regarded his hand together.  There was nothing to be said, but the Master felt a new sense of urgency about their mission. 

 

The Doctor scrubbed his hand through his hair.  “Two can play at a game of minds,” he said, closing his eyes.

 

As he spoke, two creatures rose from the dust.  They were the same color as the earth from which they came, their legs folded at a strange angle so that knees with shell-like crusts faced forward.  Heads raised from the ground on long necks. Uncomprehending eyes regarded them. 

 

The Doctor approached them, a hand out in greeting.

 

And then he stumbled to a halt, a hand to his head.

 

“What is it?” the Master asked.

 

“Yellow cube,” the Doctor whispered.

 

“What?”

 

The Doctor turned to stare at him, eyes wide.  “She’s in trouble.”

 

“Your human?”

 

“Yes.  She only got two words through to me before she was . . . snuffed out somehow.”

 

“Yellow cube?”

 

“Precisely.”  The Doctor crouched down, scooping up a handful of dust and pressing it between his hands.  Before the Master could ask, he closed his eyes and was lost in concentration.  The walls of the eye shuddered and the Master started.  He cast a glance at the Doctor, but there would be no help there for the moment.  So he focused on the walls himself, compelling them to remain where they were through sheer force of will.

 

Then the Doctor was back and he opened his eyes.  With a flourish, he opened his hands to reveal a—“Yellow cube,” he said, flashing the Master a grin.  Then the cube disappeared into one of the Doctor’s pockets.

 

The Master was unimpressed.  “Are you quite done?”

 

“Hmm?  Oh, yes.”  The Doctor flicked his wrist and produced a carrot.  He strolled over to the nearest beast.  It snaked its head over and began to eat. 

 

The Master was less eager to approach.  “What are they?” he asked.

 

“Camels,” the Doctor said.  “They’re a sort of Earth pack-animal.  Very common and well-adapted to desert life.”  He came around the side of the seated beast and swung his leg over its back.  The Master approached the remaining creature and did the same.  He waited, wondering what came next.

 

The so-called camel rose.  Its back legs were first, straightening as the Master leaned violently backwards in an attempt to retain his balance.  He was surprised at the height the camel achieved.  Then the front legs unfolded and his seat levelled out.  The Master thought they were standing, but the camel continued to rise, doubling its height in one motion.  The Master looked down.  There was no easy way to dismount or escape.  He was, like it or not, in the hands of an imaginary animal. 

 

An imaginary animal . . . oh, Doctor.  He _was_ clever: thoughts were the only thing easily transferred through the mindscape, so mentally-crafted animals would be able to track other thought patterns if created to do so, even without the scent trail.

 

The camels plodded forward, and the Master bypassed his respiratory system at the last possible second before hitting the wall of dust.  It was easier to not breathe when he wasn’t walking or running.  Even with the minor physical adjustments required to remain on the camel, he could hold his breath for about an hour.

 

Unfortunately, once he was bypassing, all he could think about was his lungs.  He hoped it was just his own morbid imaginings, but he thought he could _feel_ the blood pooling in his chest from whatever injury the mysterious bone had caused.  A horrific sense of helplessness washed over him, compounded by the loneliness of the storm.  His entire world had narrowed to the swirling dust around him, the shriek of the wind in his ears, and the drip of blood within his lungs.

 

Then, so distant it seemed more imagined than real, a spire emerged from the dust for a split second before being subsumed once more.  The camel plodded in that direction, and the Master waited, watching for the next glimpse of his destination, forcing all his focus onto that goal.  The dust parted for a few seconds, and he saw the spire.  He got the impression of a lumpy pattern to it, but couldn’t tell why that was.

 

As they drew near, the dust storm began to wane.  First, the Master could see the Doctor and his camel.  Then he could see the virus slinking along nearby.  Finally, emerging from the settling dust like a grasping hand, there was a castle made of the desert.  Dust was packed and shaped to make turrets and walls.  It was a twisted imitation of a building, and the Master felt an unease settled over him.

 

The camels stopped and their front legs folded as one.  The Master leaned back and rode out the uneven descent.  When the camel was prone with its legs tucked under it, he clambered off and stepped away, the animal forgotten after it ceased to be of use.

 

The Doctor looked at him, and he looked back.  They were both caked in dust.  More dust than cloth by now.  The Master flexed his arm, frowning as he realized he was going to have difficulty moving with so much dust on him.  He patted at his suit, but all efforts were ineffectual.

 

“Still a literalist,” the Doctor said, and then waved his hand in front of him with an unnecessary flourish.  As his hand passed, the dust disappeared. 

 

The Master attempted to do the same, but the dust was stubborn, and he found that he couldn’t refute the evidence of his eyes.  The dust was _there_, and no amount of wishful thinking could dislodge it.

 

The Doctor stepped in close, snorting his derision.  The Master felt his ire rise.  He hated being shown up, and especially by this particular man!  The Doctor moved to wave away the Master’s dust, but his hand was caught before he could do anything.

 

“I am perfectly capable of taking care of this myself,” the Master snapped. 

 

The Doctor smirked, but made no move to pull back.  The Master dropped the hand and focused on himself.  All he had to do, according to the so-called rules of this place, was to believe he wasn’t covered in dust.  He just had to ignore the evidence of his eyes.  And his skin.  And his clothes.

 

He waved his hands in front of him.

 

Nothing happened.

 

Unable to do anything more than snarl an unintelligible curse, the Master watched as the Doctor’s hand passed over him, leaving an unblemished suit and unhampered skin in its wake.  When he was done the Doctor turned and started walking again, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  The virus bounded forward to join him.

 

If looks were knives, the Master would have stabbed the Doctor in the back at that moment, but as it was, the Doctor dashed toward the door hollowed out of the dust wall.  The Master followed, and they ducked into a cool, damp interior.  The tunnel they stood in slanted down into the ground.  The rest of the castle, it seemed, was merely decorative.

 

The Doctor became cautious at that point.  The patter of his running footfalls against packed ground dropped away to nothing as he slunk through the semi-dark of the tunnel.  The Master followed, silent as the grave, and the virus stopped to take up the rear.

 

The tunnel twisted into the earth, lit by an unseen source, and at some point the dust walls ended and they were surrounded by the same sandstone as the mountains.  The tunnel seemed more naturally cut at this point.  There were narrows through which they both had difficulty squeezing.  The sandstone was filled with veins colored a thousand variations on brown, red, orange and yellow. The formations worn into the stone by flowing water looked, when glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, like dead faces.

 

Gradually, the ceiling of the tunnel got lower.  They had to stoop, and then crawl.  The light got brighter, and then the space widened back into a tunnel.  The two Time Lords pulled themselves to their feet and continued along their way. 

 

Not far after that, the tunnel exploded out into a huge cavern.  They took in their surroundings.  The ceiling far above arched, and the grooves were formed like natural support beams.  In the center of the cavern there was a raised dais with a narrow chasm running down its middle. 

 

And perched above that seam in the earth, poised on a tripod, was the Doctor’s human.  She wore a red gown which rippled and flowed about her, its folds caught in the breeze coming up from the chasm.  Her hair hung loose about her shoulders.  Her eyes and expression were lifeless.  At her side stood a replica of the Doctor, perfect in appearance if not in the casual cruelty marring his face.

 

The human raised her arm, her finger pointing directly at them, but she didn’t say a word.

 

“Oh, Rassilon,” the Doctor breathed, and on his face was a look of such stricken terror that the Master felt the sentiment echo within himself. 

 

The Doctor took a step forward, but faltered under the girl’s unblinking gaze.

 

“What is she?” the Master asked, his own voice strangled. 

 

The Doctor’s voice was taut with agony.  “She’s a Pythia.  A human vessel for a god.”

 

The false Doctor smiled, and its eyes blazed yellow.  Not the brilliant amber-gold of the cheetah virus, but a sickly greenish-yellow which spoke of something entirely different.  “She’s never been anything else,” the girl said in a voice which was neither human nor female, and traversed the distance between them effortlessly without need for shouting.  Her words reverberated through every surface and filled up the cavern with sound.  The Master had no doubt he would still hear her if he covered his ears.

 

Unlike her, he had no such ability.  His own voice was rich and resonant, yes, but there was no way he should have been heard from that distance.  Which begged the question: how had this pair, the Pythia and her false Doctor, heard his previous comment?

 

The false Doctor reached up and ran its fingers though her hair.  She didn’t react, though the Doctor’s breath stuttered.  The false Doctor’s smile widened as if in reaction, and Master started.  If it could hear something so soft . . .

 

Of course!  The tunnel, the entire castle was the center of the desert, and the pinnacle of the invading mind’s creation.  This was his domain.  “It can hear everything we’re saying,” he whispered.  “Everything we think.”

 

The false Doctor continued to speak through the girl, ignoring the Master’s words.  “You thought to save her, perhaps even to claim her as your own, but you can’t undo what is done, Time Lord.  She is my Wolf.”

 

The Master was lost, but understood enough to know that whatever this being was, it was far more than he had anticipated.  Even more than he had believed it to be from their brief mental encounter.  There was something stretching out from it, a tear in time itself.  All around the presence, time was gone.  Not the natural lack of time one would find in the vortex, but an ugly absence.

 

And then the Doctor breathed one name, a name the Master had heard whispered in legends and fears throughout hundreds of galaxies, and he finally understood the enormity of their situation:

 

“Fenric.”

 


	10. The White Queen

The Pythia watched.  She thought nothing, was nothing, but everything that happened within the chamber was seen and remembered.  In her vision, the mindscape had altered and many of the illusions were stripped away.  Through the haze of the vapor rising from the chasm, images flickered in and out of her periphery.  Except the God.  The God was brilliant yellow and shone like the sun.

 

The God had created the mindscape entire, but this chamber was the focus of its power.  Outside, in the desert, control belonged to the being with the strongest imagination and will.  Here in the chamber’s confines, the God held sway over all.

 

Three minds had encroached on the God’s territory, seeking something.  Their identities were known to her, given by the God.  The strangest of the minds, not living but aware, was the Virus, defeated enemy of the God, now risen to mount a final strike.  It would fail, as all attempts to defeat the God would fail.  The Virus understood this, and it melted into the shadows near a wall.

 

Then there were the two like minds, both identifying as male.  They were narrow but contained within them depths and crevasses even the God did not know, created by time in vast spans.  When are seven minds one?  The Pythia did not know this answer.  It was not given her by the God.

 

The younger of the two like minds appeared in contrast: extreme lights and deep shadows.  One moment blinding and the next unseen, he changed as extremely and as regularly as the pulse of a neutron star.  This was the Enemy.

 

The other was shrouded in shadow at all times.  Faint glimmers could be seen, but darkly, through a veil of lies and half-truths woven in a shroud.  This was the Stranger.

 

“Ace,” the Enemy said, looking at her.  The symbolism of this word was unknown to her, and was thus not important.  She returned his gaze.  “Ace, can you hear me?”

 

She cocked her head.  The word was a name or descriptor he was attaching to her.  The Enemy’s eyes narrowed and his thoughts reached out to her.  When he touched her mind, he reeled back, and the Stranger caught him by the arm before he fell.

 

The Stranger and the Enemy exchanged a glance.

 

“What have you done to her?” the Enemy asked the God, anger evident in his stance.

 

The God communicated itself to her, and its voice emerged from her throat, coupled with something flat and feminine.  Remnants of the shell.  “What do you think I have done?”

 

It was the Stranger who spoke.  “You hollowed her out to make room.”

 

The Enemy gave her a horrified look.  The Pythia blinked.  “Ace,” the Enemy said, his desperation shivering the mindscape.  Was he so powerful that he could alter the God’s own creation through the power of his emotions?  Even the Stranger felt the warp of mental reality, and his surprise was a soft counterpoint to the anxiety tainting the world. 

 

“You must remember _something_,” the Enemy said.  “There must be some aspect of you left.  You have to fight!”

 

The God spoke through her, “Nothing of the girl survives.”  It placed a blazing hand on her shoulder and moved her lips.  They twisted up at the corners, and the Enemy’s desperation faltered, dropping away and turning to horror.  He pressed a hand over his mouth and his eyes were wide as he stared at her.

 

The Stranger’s voice rang out, echoing in the chamber.  His words were tangles in which the Pythia could easily get lost.  He breathed lies through silver, and his intentions and thoughts were impossible to glean.  “Am I correct in assuming that you’re embedded where her mind used to be?”

 

“Who are you?” the God asked.

 

“Unimportant.  Answer the question.  Are you embedded?”

 

The God’s ire made its blaze intensify.  “Her mind is now mine.”

 

“But a moment ago, you said that nothing of her mind survives.  You can’t have it both ways.  Either her mind is yours or it’s dead.”

 

The God flickered as it gauged the Stranger.  “I felt it die.”  The divine tones were slow as they dripped out of the Pythia’s obedient mouth.

 

The Stranger nodded, and then lunged forward.  The Enemy let out a cry, but the Stranger was faster.  He caught the Pythia’s chin and the back of her head and wrenched.  Vertebrae snapped like dry twigs.

 

The Stranger was hurled backward and skidded across the floor of the chamber.  The God’s power rebuilt her neck bit by bit and the Pythia straightened her head to regard the scene once more.

 

“How dare you—” the Enemy started, staring at the Stranger.

 

At the same time, the God said, “That was pathetically linear.”

 

“That was a test,” the Stranger said.  He looked at the Enemy.  “Fenric is sustaining two bodies.  Why?”

 

The Enemy’s thoughts swirled about him like a cloud. 

 

The Stranger continued to speak.  “Its control isn’t complete.  If it was, we would only see her as the living embodiment of Fenric.  If, on the other hand, it believed itself incapable of taking her over, it would have let her die just to kill us with her.”

 

The Enemy was shaking his head, stepping on the sentence before it had been completed.  “No.  No, it can’t.  It’s as dependent on her life as we are.”

 

The Stranger crossed his arms over his chest.  “Really, Doctor, don’t be obtuse!  Cascade failure only applies to those people actu—”

 

“Actually connected to the mind-bender.  Yes, I know!  But Fenric can’t survive without the vessel.  We’re in the vortex.  If it destroys the three of us, it has nowhere else to go.  It would dissipate, lose coherence.”

 

The Pythia had no interest in the exchange, although she watched and soaked in all that transpired in the God’s domain.  It was amused by what it saw, and its amusement commanded her rapt attention.

 

“There is one place it could go,” the Stranger said.  “What does it need, after all?  Not a human, but a mind.  A sentience.”

 

The amusement was gone in a second, and a word was forced through her: “Enough.”

 

“The TARDIS,” the Enemy said, his realization blurred by anxiety.  “It couldn’t possibly have that kind of strength.”

 

“Enough!”  The God’s ire was powerful, and the Pythia’s vision reeled.

 

“Perhaps not.  I would imagine that’s why it hasn’t tried yet,” the Stranger said.  “That, and the TARDIS is bound to the machine.  It’s not independently mobile outside the vortex, whereas a human could control the TARDIS and walk about in our universe.”  He frowned at the Pythia, and his thoughts were swirls of shadow about him, wringing him like wraiths.  “The point still stands.  It hasn’t gained full control of the girl, and until it does, it has to maintain this . . . other form.”  He gestured to the blazing being at her side, but it was as though he could not see the God’s glory.  He did not cower as the light became blinding.  He didn’t even squint.  In fact, he looked disdainful, and the Pythia could not comprehend his actions.  “Can’t say I care for it myself,” he said.

 

The Enemy cocked an eyebrow, but otherwise ignored whatever this comment was meant to convey.  He was looking at her again.  “She’s still in there somewhere,” he said, the blur around him sharpening with his conviction. 

 

“Enough,” the God growled, and his voice through her was heavy with warning.

 

The Stranger’s triumph glowed around it, dimming even the God.  He laughed.  “‘I felt her die’?  For a force of unremitting evil, you’re a terrible liar.”

 

Anger which was not hers burned through her and she waited for the God to speak the words which would curb these errant children, but the Enemy was shooting the Stranger looks of disbelief.  Accusations swam between them for a moment.  Then the Enemy smiled.  “Well,” he said, “prevarication has never been Fenric’s strong point.” 

 

The Stranger drifted around the dais, leaving the Enemy closer to the Pythia.  The Stranger spoke.  “What _are_ your strong points?  A great deal of import is attached to the name Fenric, but now that I see you . . . what are you that the universe fears you so?”

 

“I am Fenric.”

 

“Granted, but what does that mean?”

 

The God cast its hand out and the Stranger knew what the God was.  He reeled under the assault.  The columns around the room came alive, and there were faces in the stone.  It was a tactic the God had used against the Stranger twice before with increasing efficacy.  This time was no exception.  The Stranger paled and the faces began to emit sounds.  Screams and pleas echoed throughout the cavern.  The Stranger looked about with a wild expression, and appeared to know every one of them. 

 

The screams became louder, and hands emerged from the stone, detaching themselves one finger at a time until they reached from the columns towards the Stranger.  The Enemy pressed his palms against his ears to block out the sound, and the Virus leaped away from the reaching hands, growling at the disturbance.

 

The Stranger clutched his hands over the sides of his head and squeezed his eyes closed.  Entire arms were now emerging from the columns, as though the people in the stone would spill out, whole and alive, to attack him.  He swayed, and then fell to his knees. 

 

The God’s extended hand clenched into a fist.  Its words burned in the Pythia’s throat as it said, “That is what I am.”

 

A bone chess piece fell from the Stranger’s mouth, covered in blood and bits of tissue.  Another came up and then another, interspersed with fluids as the Stranger’s body tore itself apart from the inside.  The screaming from the faces in the walls grew louder, and their torsos pulled free.  The Stranger collapsed to his side, convulsing weakly as a reddish froth continued to flow from his mouth.

 

The screams stopped and the people in the stone froze, still there but no longer mobile.

 

The Enemy watched this exchange with wide, troubled eyes.  Not grieving, but something which was struggling to be grief.  Something with the stony texture of responsibility.  His lips compressed into a grim line, and he reached into his pocket.  He pulled his hand out clenched in a fist, and then, with a flick of his wrist, sent the object he was holding onto the dais before her.

 

Was this some sort of offering to the God?  The Pythia could not comprehend the significance of a small yellow cube, but in a mindscape, every object held meaning.  She looked at the Enemy, her head cocked to one side.  He glanced down at the cube, and then back up at her, and she felt thoughts brush against her.  They made no sense, like a code without a key.  The Pythia looked at the cube, and a single thought was made clear to her: ‘Take it.’

 

One bare foot touched the smooth sandstone of the dais, and then the other.  The Pythia slipped from her seat, and her gown swirled about her.  She bent down, and her fingers closed over the cube.  She lifted it, holding it in her palm, and gazed at it.  She opened her mouth, but words would not form.  There was something, some thought attempting to take shape within her.  Yellow cube . . .

 

Yellow cube meant danger.  Yellow cube . . . something that could harm those she loved.  Love?  It was a sentiment she could identify in others through its manifest symptoms, but she herself was incapable of the emotion, of any emotion.  Perhaps it was a warning that something would attempt to harm her God.  Devotion had similar symptoms to love.

 

She tried once more to articulate that something tearing at her mind, forcing itself out.  “P—” she managed, because plosives were simple sounds, only requiring air and correct formation, but the next sound was impossible.  It required vocal cords which were not hers to command.

 

“You tried to save me from yourself,” the Pr—the Do—the _Enemy_ said.

 

“P—p—”  The next sound would not be formed!  She stared at the Enemy, and there was sorrow in his face which somehow touched her.  He tossed a look over his shoulder, a worried look, at the Stranger who still convulsed weakly on the ground.  Responsibility.  And it wasn’t just that the Enemy had brought him to this place, it was . . .

 

The Pythia stopped trying to pronounce the unknown word.  She was caught up in the suddenly overwhelming notion that the whole exchange up to that point had been choreographed.  The God had been accused and challenged and contradicted as a deliberate distraction.  The Stranger had _invited_ his own suffering to allow the Enemy this time to confront her.

 

And the Pythia was caught in another notion: how had she had these thoughts, when all she knew was given her by the God? 

 

It didn’t matter.  She could not articulate what came after the ‘P’ and there was no more time.  She sensed the God begin to turn, and she slipped the cube into the folds of her gown.  She had to retain the cube!  It meant something!  It was important!  If she could understand the cube, she would understand the God, and that was the only thing that mattered. 

 

And then the God’s hand came down on her shoulder, and she fell back in her seat.  Her half-formed thoughts were obliterated in the God’s cleansing fire, but the cube was still clutched in her hand.

 

“Foolish, Time Lord,” the God said through her.  “You seek to save the girl even now?”

 

“We’ve proved that her consciousness is there somewhere!  I just have to find it, and believe me when I say I will.”  He began to circle away from the Pythia, drawing the God’s attention back around the dais. 

 

The Stranger, still on the floor, stirred weakly, but the God no longer paid him any heed.  The Enemy was the only one who mattered, and he was moving to the opposite side of the dais from the Stranger.

 

“You know,” the Enemy said, a bland smile on his face as he put his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet, “I thought I’d killed you.”

 

The God’s derision was lightning before the strike, crackling the air.  His words burst forth from the Pythia, “You are limited by your physicality, Time Lord.  I have no form, no corporeal existence.  Cut down one of my number and another will rise up.”

 

“Is that what you’re doing now?  Rising up?” the Enemy asked.

 

The God caressed the Pythia’s hair.  “She is strong, this woman you shelter.  Tempered by trial and time travel.  I have bided my time since there was no time, parsing my being from dark matter and cosmic background radiation.”  The God laughed, and articulating the sound tore at her.  “To think, when we met on a dead world, you believed you understood what I was.  The ant looked up and contemplated God.”

 

“A god who hides behind a human woman?  Who survives only when her life sustains it?” the Enemy taunted.  “If you truly want to draw me into a confrontation, let her go.  Deal with me directly.  It’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?  What you tried to tell me through that rather bloody display in the eye of the storm.  All of this is about a rematch!  Let’s get on with it, then.  I believe the phrase is ‘winner takes all’.”

 

The god laughed through her.  “You think in terms of battle, but there is none.  You speak of a chess game, but the game has been played for months now, and when you entered this world, I had won.  That, Time Lord, was checkmate.”

 

“Was it, now?  But that’s the funny thing about the endgame: it’s always indeterminate until it’s done.  It’s how you never knew that the Ancient One could turn on you.  You’ve been trapped in linear time far too long, Fenric.  You can’t think out of sequence anymore.”

 

“I cannot think out of sequence?”  The God’s voice was beginning to create a strange pressure in the Pythia’s head, as though there were too much there, and not enough of her to release it.  “You are a fool.  I planned this before time even began.  Before you even conceived of this human as your companion, I had selected her for you.  I crafted her for you, and you dare to claim I cannot think out of sequence?”

 

“Ah, but there’s a flaw in your reasoning,” the Enemy said.  “You only project forward.  You believe the future is static because you’re so desperate to control it, but you never will.  You can’t, and it _galls_ you.”

 

There was a soft noise, and the Pythia looked to see that the Virus had emerged from its hiding, and gone to the Stranger.  It bent over him, one paw on his chest and its face directly over his.  The Stranger stirred, reaching up to touch the Virus behind its ear.

 

The God’s will brought her head snapping back around to regard the real threat.  “Really?” the God asked through her, and laid a proprietary hand on her knee.  “Can I not control the future, Doctor?  Tell me, when I awaken in her body, will you be able to kill me?”  The Enemy’s eyes clouded with something, but the Pythia was at a loss to describe it.  The God continued, “When last we met, you deceived me.  You claimed you would sacrifice her.  Now, as I’ve existed within her, I’ve come to know you better.  You would sacrifice planets, entire civilizations for the so-called betterment of the universe.  But can you sacrifice _her_?”  The god stroked her thigh.  “I think not.”

 

The Enemy stared at the dais, not at the God.  His words, when he spoke, were little more than breath, but they resonated throughout the cavern.  “Yes,” he whispered, “I could.”

 

Something shifted in the balance of power.  The Enemy smoldered with loathing, not directed at the God, but at himself.  The admission, although it seemed a strong counterargument and even a position of power the Enemy could use to bolster his attack, had the opposite effect.  The Enemy was lost in a whirlpool of self-hatred.  His introspection left him vulnerable.  The God struck. 

 

The Enemy staggered.  His mind’s cohesion was assaulted by the reality woven by the God.  For a second, confusion softened the edges of his form, and it seemed he would dissolve completely.  Then he regained solidity, but his face showed the strain.  The God pressed its advantage.  “I will rise, Time Lord, and you will kill her to stop me.  You will save your precious universe, but in so doing, you’ll become me.  Evil older than time itself.  No conscience, no remorse, just the relentless pursuit of your so-called ‘greater good.’  And you won’t ever come back.  Not once you’ve taken that step.”

 

The Enemy fell to his knees, a stricken expression on his face.  He could not refute the God, and so he had lost.  The God released its grip on her knee and strode forward.  It spoke, but not through her.  This was its own voice, so ancient it rent the universe around it.  “I have seen what’s to come, Doctor.  You’ve already set the pieces in motion, and you don’t even realize it.”  The God pointed an accusatory finger at the Enemy and thundered, “All actions shall have an equal and opposite reaction.  That which you have done shall be revisited upon you, and everything you’ve known will be stripped away.”  The Enemy shuddered, collapsing forward and catching himself with one hand.  The other clutched at his head.

 

The God caught the Enemy by the scruff of the neck and snapped his head back, bending down so they were eye to eye.  The Enemy hissed in pain.  The flames bathing the God crept out in curling fingers along the floor. 

 

The Pythia was gripped by the shoulder and wrenched from her perch.  She toppled off the tripod, striking the floor as her body flopped bonelessly.  Her head lolled and she stared up at the Stranger.  He crouched over her, one side of his face slick with blood, but strong in spite of it.  His eyes burned, but they were not his eyes.  They belonged to the Virus, as did the elongated canines and the predatory stance.  They had collapsed into a single entity.

 

Her mind could not form a warning.  She did not have enough consciousness to do so.  Neither did she have speech.  She could only note that the Stranger pressed a hand to her shoulder to prevent movement, and that he reached into his jacket. 

 

He drew forth a mirror and held it before her. 

 

She saw a square-jawed face framed with long blonde hair.  A girl on a gurney, pale but not delicate, with a straight nose.  She’d never liked her nose.  She’d always thought it was too girly.  What kind of woman who makes her own bombs has a girly nose?

 

Her own bombs?

 

Yes!  She made her own bombs, and bloody good ones, too!  And that wasn’t all she did.  She fought bad guys.  Daleks and Helen A and Cybermen and Lady Peinforte and clowns and the Destroyer and Light.  And Fenric, the worst of the lot.

 

Ace’s fist clenched in reaction as she remembered herself, and her palm bit into something still clutched there.  She looked down to see the yellow cube.  She remembered the danger she’d posed to the Doctor.  She remembered trying to protect him from herself.  She realized that forsaking reality for unconsciousness had, in fact, done the opposite.  Stupid.

 

But that was the point.  Focusing on the cube when Fenric had smothered her mind hadn’t just been about setting up a memory trigger.  It had been an apology.  She had failed to protect. 

 

And that made everything fall into place.  Nothing was concealed from her now.  She was aware of Fenric—who now was back in his fake Doctor suit—standing over the real Doctor.  Gloating.  Ready for the final strike.

 

Ace’s gaze snapped up.  She didn’t know who the man saving her was, but he nodded when he saw her eyes.  He slipped the mirror away, and his thoughts formed in her head as Fenric’s had, and they were no less imperative: ‘Idiot human.  It’s _your_ mind.’

 

For a second his mind touched hers and they both understood. Her eyes widened.  It was the Master!  The Master was in her head!  The Master had saved her, and how royally screwed up was that?

 

She had no time to wonder what secrets he’d divined from her.  She had to save the Doctor.  The Master obviously thought her devotion was stupid, but if the situations had been reversed, Ace thought that some part of him would be just as devoted.  Some part of him _was_ devoted, and that was just as weird as anything she’d encountered in the mindscape.

 

But, Master or no, he was right.  It was _her_ mind.

 

She felt a perfect clarity in that moment which lit the chamber a brilliant white. After so much confusion and so much manipulation, Ace was in control.  She flowed to her feet, and the dress melted away in a red flood.  It splashed on the dais, part fabric and part liquid, and formed a textured stain which curved around her in the shape of a shell.  Bloody Venus emerging from the sea.  Complete with nudity.  Funny that she didn’t feel exposed.

 

“Oi, Fenric!” she shouted, and hurled the yellow cube she still held at the thing bwa-ha-ha-ing all over her Doctor.  With pinpoint accuracy, the cube hit it right behind the ear, and Fenric whirled.  The Doctor looked up and then scrambled to his feet. 

 

She came forward like a thundercloud.  Around her, the world rippled and changed.  The chasm widened and at each footfall white marble spread out from the places where her feet touched the ground, and it devoured the sandstone.  First the dais, and then outward.

 

She halted before Fenric.  The bastard who had been the ruling force in her life since before she _had_ a life. 

 

Fenric ignored her and spoke to the Doctor.  “Your pawn is very loyal.  Why is that, I wonder?”

 

Ace was sick and tired of everyone talking about her like she wasn’t there.  Like this wasn’t her mindscape they were all tramping about in.  She said, “‘Cause he’s the Doctor.  And look at the alternative.  No offense—well, okay, that’s a lie—but I like my men a little more sane and a little less flamey.”  She squinted at him.  “Mind you, even the flames were better than this shoddy imitation.  Could you have at least _tried_ for accuracy?”

 

Fenric cocked its head at her audacity.  She smirked.  It hadn’t seen anything yet. 

 

“The way I see it, you’ve got your black king and your white king having it out,” she said.  “You get to be black ‘cause you’re evil since the dawn of time, okay?  The Professor here doesn’t think he’s the white king, because white shouldn’t be able to do the things he’s capable of doing.”  She looked at the Doctor, straight into those self-loathing eyes of his, and said, “But you’re wrong.  If a white king _can’t_ do those things, black’ll wipe him off the board.  Besides, if it came down to me or the universe, _I’d_ hate you if you picked me.”

 

“Ace,” he whispered, half-strangled on emotion.

 

Ace turned away from him.  This wasn’t the time, and it definitely wasn’t the place to get into that sort of thing.  Fenric was going to make a move if she didn’t make one first.  “And you,” she said to it, “you’ve got me down as one of the pawns.  But you’re wrong.  I’m no pawn.  Not anymore.”  She held out her hand.  The Doctor stared at her, and she saw his hesitancy and the remnants of his regret, but all of that flickered and died.  He stepped forward, even as Fenric moved to intercept him, and he took her hand. 

 

She pulled.  Not physically, but mentally.  She had learned that from Fenric, and now . . . she felt the Doctor’s mind slam up against hers.  “I’m the white queen,” she said, barely recognizing the sound of her own voice.  The Doctor’s hand tightened around hers, and the other came down on her shoulder, boosting the connection.  The crack through the dais rumbled and began to split the chamber in two.  Fenric stared at her in utter bewilderment, and Ace felt like a hawk dropping out of the sky on some poor dumb mouse.

 

“You can’t,” it said.  “You can’t possibly.”

 

Fenric pushed against her mind, and she felt the edges tremble.  It was older than time.  It’d had infinite years to hone its skills, and it would not go quietly.  She focused her will along with that of the Doctor, but she felt the stalemate.

 

And the there was another hand on her arm and the Master’s mind hit hers, melded and strengthened through the cheetah virus’ intervention.  His experience and his will were incredible.  Power filled her and Fenric staggered.  The chasm in the floor opened further and the columns became white marble and beautiful, the petrified figures smoothing back into the stone.

 

“My mind,” she said, “my rules.”  And the chasm tore itself wide open.

 

Fenric charged her, and Ace hit it with every ounce of power she had.  It was knocked backwards, the blast lifting it off its feet.  It struck the edge of the chasm, and she heard its spine crack.  She felt the flare of pain along her own back, but didn’t let it stop her.  She hit it again, and it tumbled off the edge.

 

The three of them fell to the floor, and she was a bit thankful she was too busy to think much on the fact that her naked form was currently tangled up with the Doctor and the bloody Master.  She funneled the rest of their resources into closing the rift above Fenric, locking him so far down and away that he would never be able to lay claim to her mind again.

 

The chasm sealed itself and the dais was once again whole.  Then the ceiling shattered and white marble rained down.


	11. Reset to Zero

The Master woke up.  White light.  White so stark and blinding it was the heart of an atomic blast.  White like the marble that flowed from the human’s feet as she’d finally made her move. 

 

Made her move in a cavern full of . . . all those tormented faces . . .

 

With a gasp, he jerked himself upright.  His arms reached out blindly for support, which meant that he had arms, which was good.  His upward momentum was halted by the sudden tug at the skin of his temples.  He froze.  A creeping sense of dread stole through him, but he quashed it.  He just needed a moment to regain his bearings and assess the situation.  He would be fine.

 

He was no longer in the mindscape, he was almost certain.  The room certainly looked like the one in which they had built the mind-bender.  Every item which they had used, discarded, or ignored sat where they had been dropped before the ordeal.  There were no strange additions, no subtractions, no infernal metaphor in sight.  It was clear, concise reality, right down to the pull of the electrodes connected to his head.

 

He had escaped.  He’d made it out alive.  Astonishing.

 

Still shaking from the terror and the residual pain of the injuries inflicted upon him in the mindscape, he tore at the electrodes.  If he didn’t remove them immediately he could be pulled back into the mindscape.  He would have to face those figures in the walls once more . . . those faces which screamed and begged and beckoned him to join them at long last . . .

 

No!  He had no time for such irrelevant fears.  He had enough to deal with without some heretofore-unknown guilt complex making its appearance.  He pulled the last electrode free from his head and staggered from the chair.  His inferior body was in riot.  He got three steps before collapsing to the floor and sucking air, focusing his will on retaining the contents of his stomach.

 

He took an experimental breath and felt meager lungs fill, unhindered by dust, blood, or bone.  He shook from the aftershocks of the experience.  By rights, he should be dead.

 

But he wasn’t.  He was breathing, and intact, and even if he seemed to be shaking uncontrollably, it really wasn’t that surprising given all he’d been through.  He gave the room a more calm assessment than his previous attempts to confirm the reality of his situation.  This was still hostile territory, after all.  One miraculous escape was not enough.  He had to remove himself from this craft.  The alternative was to leave the Doctor free to choose to go back on his word.  He could be abandoned on some backwards child-planet even after everything he had done!  He wasn’t about to let that happen.

 

He jerked to his feet and fell back down as vertigo hit him.  He landed amidst an abandoned pile of biotubing and it squelched around his hands.  His head whipped around.  Had they . . . no they hadn’t.  The Doctor and his companion were still unconscious.  He rolled his eyes at himself and let out a gust of breath.  Well of course they were!  He’d made sure of it.  Engineering a few minutes to himself upon ejecting from the program had been the most natural act of self-preservation.  The two of them were still caught between realities in an ingenious little mental holding pattern

 

He got to his feet again, careful to retain his balance.  He had to think.  He couldn’t allow himself to be killed.  He started to pace.  Surely there was a way out of the situation.  He just had to think!

 

He tripped over something.  His feet thudded a few graceless steps before he could catch himself on a countertop and turn to see what had been in the way.  That ridiculous club-thing—what had it been called?  The shock-negotiator.  He stared down at it.  Yes, that had distinct possibilities.

 

The weapon was in his hands before he really knew he’d picked it up.  He crossed the room in a daze.  He had a clear enemy and, now, a means to dispose of him.  There would be no guilt.  Being here, in the TARDIS, in this danger, was no fault of his own.  His enemy had put him there.  He’d been dragged into the situation, never mind that it had nearly killed him.  The Master did not take well to nearly dying.

 

He raised the club.

 

And then he lowered it.  He couldn’t.  Not this way, and not just because those accursed temporal grace circuits would stop him before he could do anything.  No, the situation was delicate.  Murder gave him no advantage, not when the TARDIS controls were still locked out.  Besides, he was not a thug.  That kind of physical violence was beneath him.  Usually.

 

He didn’t think about the twinge of horror at the mere thought of killing the Doctor in such a way.  He couldn’t do it, but it had everything to do with logic and logistics.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with sentiment.  He dropped the shock-negotiator.

 

There had to be a way to unlock the TARDIS controls!  The Doctor was scatterbrained as a rule.  Would he have written down the lockout code somewhere?  He rushed across the room and snatched up the Doctor’s discarded jacket.  He dug through the pockets.  A watch from the Academy.  No.  A sonic screwdriver.  No.  An apple-core, which the Master immediately flung across the room.  No!  He tried every pocket, spreading the odds and ends he found there on the floor at his feet.  There were scraps of paper, yes, but none which could be an _aide-memoire_ for the code.  Just idiotic reminders about planets in jeopardy and maintenance needed on the TARDIS console. 

 

He snarled and dropped the jacket.  His next search was the Doctor himself, but an inspection of his trouser pockets was just as fruitless.  The Master had to quash another urge to club the impossible little man, temporal grace or not.  It was useless, though.  He had to . . . he had to . . .

 

He had to breathe.  Small wonder his ideas were lacking.  Decent plans needed time and application.  Even if he’d managed to stop stumbling about like a lunatic, he was still less composed than he’d like.  The Master closed his eyes and afforded himself a few moments to breathe.  Then, his footsteps heavy, he trudged over to the seat he’d just vacated at the mind-bender and collapsed into it.  He scrubbed at his face with shaking hands.

 

He needed some way to ensure that the Doctor let him go.  For that to happen, he needed a weakness to exploit.  He needed an advantage.  His gaze traversed the room.  Of course, when he saw it, he felt a bit foolish for not having seen it sooner.

 

The human.  She was extremely important to the Doctor, of that the Master was certain.  Even if the Doctor wouldn’t sacrifice the universe for her, she apparently came close enough to warrant a sense of dilemma.  Close enough was perfectly acceptable.  The human was the key.  All he had to do was engineer a situation in which her life would be in danger and only he could get her out of it.  That was bargaining power, and that would guarantee his safe release.

 

He rose and crossed the room in swift, decisive steps, noting with satisfaction that his strength was returning.  He looked down at her helpless form, a delicate tumble of flesh and bone on the metal of the gurney.  It was strange, but in that instant, he felt he had known her for a very long time.

 

Time became relative when minds touched minds, perhaps.  His direct contact had been brief, but it had been enough.  He’d seen in this human a life duller than words could describe.  All things which stood out in her mind as important—her mother driving her from their home, her first boyfriend, all the faces of those she loved—it was all so trivial.

 

She actually thought she knew about love and loss, this tiny being.  About desperation.  What could she hope to know about these things?  He glanced back at the Doctor, but pushed those thoughts aside as he realized the direction they were taking.  Love and loss were trivial themselves, in the end.

 

He had work to do.  An escape to accomplish.  He considered the tubing which connected the girl to the mind-bender.  He didn’t have time to detach her and spirit her away.  It was better to reprogram the machine to do the threatening for him.  He reached for the monitor panel.

 

And her eyes flew open. 

 

“Oh, God, I was right.  It was you.”  Her eyes narrowed as she took in his hand poised next to the panel.  “All right, Mr. Hooded Claw,” she said, “back away from the . . . the coat rack.”

 

The Master was floored.  How had she completed the eject sequence so quickly?  She should still be in the same holding pattern as the Doctor.  One glance confirmed that he was responding as planned, so why wasn’t she?

 

“My mind, my rules, remember?” she said.  “I knew the buffer was there, and I bypassed it.”  Her gaze sharpened.  “So, what were you going to do?  Polish us off, and then scarper?  Or were you going to do the gentleman-villain thing?  Lock us in a closet and walk away twirling your moustache?”

 

“Why would I do that?  The Doctor’s locked me out of the controls.”

 

“Well, three cheers for the Doctor.  Although the fact that you’re even here sort of cancels out the cleverness.  Why _are _you here, anyway?”

 

 “Your precious Doctor kidnapped me.”

 

“I dose myself into a coma so the Professor kidnaps _you_?” she asked. 

 

Her reaction resonated for some reason.  Perhaps because it mirrored his own when he had been confronted with the Doctor’s so-called train of logic.  Not that he would claim this human as some sort of kindred spirit.  Even a broken clock was right twice a day, if only for a second.  “I attempted to point out the flaws in his reasoning, but he can be quite persuasive.”

 

“He zapped you?”

 

“Poisoned me.”

 

“Nice.”  She attempted to sit up, but her arms gave out and she collapsed back, groaning and grasping at the leads in her head.  She tugged at one, and the Master moved to stop her.  Just like a human to try to yank biotubing out of her own head. 

 

“I’ve got it,” she snapped, but he ignored the hint.  Now that she was awake, he’d lost his window of opportunity to incapacitate her, and his reaction to the eject sequence was still clinging to him more than he would like.  This was not the time to attempt any sort of forcible confrontation with the Doctor’s latest protégée, who looked like she would fight like a Mormoth pit beast.  And thanks to the temporal grace circuits, there would be no hypnotizing her, either.  It was therefore in his best interests to see to her well-being.  His own depended on the girl’s, or it would when the Doctor rejoined them.

 

It was with some care that he twisted each lead away from her skull, the small red punctures bleeding a little before subsiding.  He checked each injection site, but saw no evidence of fluid leakage from the tubing.  Good. 

 

She looked uncomfortable.  Apparently she suffered under the same delusion as the Doctor that—after a few morally questionable acts—he was incapable of doing anything constructive.  He supposed he should try to reassure her that he had no murderous intentions towards her, but couldn’t quite pinpoint how such a statement should be phrased.  At last he settled with, “You bypassed the buffer by force of will and absolutely no technical knowledge.  There are going to be repercussions.”

 

As the final lead was detached, the girl rolled onto her side and retched.  While he was willing to prevent brain damage, this was beyond the pale.  He jerked his hand back, saying with some measure of disgust, “Such as that, for example.”

 

She pushed her hair back and glanced over her shoulder, her watering eyes narrowed.  “The older bloke in the suit.  Was that what you looked like back when . . . when you were a real . . . when you still had a Gallifreyan body?”

 

He stiffened, hearing the words she had so politely rephrased.  Back when he had been a real Time Lord.  Well, quite.  “That was my thirteenth regeneration,” he said, his voice flat.

 

The human girl sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest after a quick peek underneath.  Her face was creased in thought.  It seemed his reply had sparked some sort of brainstorm; not that he was interested.  He had far better things to do than be psychoanalyzed by a being whose sum total of life would barely get her out of early childhood on Gallifrey. 

 

He would have changed the subject, but the human got there first.  “He’ll be like you someday, won’t he?” she asked, although it didn’t sound like a question.

 

Of all the things the Master wasn’t expecting to hear. . .   He looked at the girl, really looked at her.  From what he knew of humans, this reaction didn’t make sense.  She should be leaping to the Doctor’s defense.  He was her friend.

 

She looked up at the Master, and seemed older somehow.  “It’s what I saw in your mind.  For a split second, I got this bird’s-eye view of your entire life.  All your regenerations.  You didn’t used to be like this.  You know.  Snidey McVillain, evil genius extraordinaire.  The lives you had before this, some of them, they reminded me of him.  A _lot_ of them reminded me of him.”  She whispered, “And now I’m worried that someday, he’ll be you.”

 

The Master was so surprised that all he could think to say was the truth.  “He already is.”

 

A lock of her hair fell into her face.  “No,” she said, “I can’t believe that.  Everything you do is for yourself.  He’s done some terrible things, yeah, but it’s always been for the greater good.”

 

The Master shrugged.  “Different motive, same means.  Does the fact that I do terrible things to stay alive whereas he does them for ‘good’ make his actions more understandable, or less so?”

 

She snorted, but the sound had no gusto behind it.  “Well, I can tell you one thing he’s got that you don’t, mate, and that’s me.  It’s why we’re a team, him and me.  He hatches the plots and I make sure they go off without a hitch.  And when he gets lost in those plans of his and forgets that there are people involved, and that the big picture’s not the only thing worth something in this universe . . . well, I’m there to shout at him.   Loud.  See, that’s my job too.  Snap him back to his senses when he gets carried away.”

 

_That_ was the reason she stayed?  To be his moral compass?  Who did she think she was fooling?  No one was that altruistic.  “I saw something in your mind as well,” he said.  “Something you seem to be either too blind to realize yet, or you’re just refusing to tell me.”

 

The single glance she shot at him over her shoulder was filled with suspicion.  So she _didn’t_ know.  How human.  The Master smirked.  It would never happen to a Time Lord.  He wondered what would happen when she finally worked it all out.  Would she run?  That, too, would be quite human.  But what about the Doctor?  Did he know?  The Master couldn’t imagine that he didn’t.  Was he ignoring it?  The Master found himself smiling.  If the Doctor knew, if he was encouraging it to ensure her continued presence, it was horrendously manipulative.  Good for him.

 

The girl saw his grin and her suspicion deepened.  “Look,” she said, “if you want to start singing ‘I Know Something You Don’t Know,’ be my guest.  Just do it somewhere else, yeah?  You’re spoiling the mood.”

 

He had to push her, to see how far this obstinate denial of the facts really went.  “I could tell you,” he said, keeping his tone nonchalant, “but knowledge loses some of its potency when shared.”

 

She snorted, and he thought she hadn’t taken the bait.  She slipped off the gurney and stood, looking at her bare feet on the TARDIS floor.  “You’re wrong,” she said in an undertone.  “You’re so bloody wrong, and you’ve been wrong for years.  Maybe forever, I dunno.  There’s nothing more powerful than sharing what you know.  Look at me.  Pretty average product from late twentieth century Earth.  My resume isn’t exactly the stuff of legends—broken home, academic failure, criminal record and a chip on my shoulder—and I’m not even out of my teens.  Leaving aside what Fenric did to me, look what’s happened: the Doctor took me in and taught me stuff.  But turnabout’s fair play, right?  He helps me by teaching me, and I help him when Fenric’s threatening the known universe.”  She shrugged with a nonchalance which suggested that facing down ancient evil wasn’t exactly an infrequent event.

 

“You didn’t manage it alone,” the Master said.  “Come now.  You teach a dog to guard your house, and one day it kills a burglar.  Does that make you more powerful?  No.  It just means that the dog has done what it was trained to do.”

 

“You may not end up ruler of the universe, but you’ve still got a dog who’ll look after you.  Power isn’t always what you’ve got, but what your friends are willing to lend you.”  She cocked her head.  “I would have figured you’d have known that already.  What did you used to call yourselves back in the bad old days?  The Gallifreyan Triumvirate?”

 

The Master had no words with which he could retaliate.  Nothing to use against that.  He _had_ thought of power differently in those days.  And if the three of them had stayed on Gallifrey and achieved power in conventional, political arenas, sharing might have been possible.  With Theta anyway.  He suspected he would have had to kill the Rani before she did the same to him.

 

But that was long ago, and trust was a childish fancy.  Betrayal was inevitable.  Theta’s main problem, no matter how advanced he was in intellect, was that he clung to that sort of infantile ideal.  He needed someone to trust, because he couldn’t bear to be alone.  In this, he would never change . . .

 

The Master’s smile sharpened.  He saw it all in a moment of epiphany.  The Doctor’s incarnations all had one thing in common: the need to stave off loneliness.  Debonaire, Bohemian, dull and noble, garish and arrogant . . . ruthless and manipulative.  But always in need of companionship.  And here she was, standing before him clad in a sheet.  The Master took new notice of her poise, her intelligence and wit, her courage and resourcefulness.  All characteristics the Doctor prized highly in himself.

 

And then the Master knew this Doctor’s great weakness, and it wasn’t in strategy or personality or anything so complex.  It was all in the person of an average human girl.  The Doctor had picked a young woman with no reason to ever want to go back to Earth, and enough loyalty and affection that she wasn’t likely to run off on him, and then he’d set to work.  He’d crafted the perfect companion for himself.  His conscience, his friend, and his weakness.  The one who wouldn’t leave him and consequently the one he’d allowed himself to depend upon.

 

The Master leaned back against the counter.  He still had need of the Doctor’s cooperation to get him back to his own TARDIS, but after that, they would resume the game they’d always played, and when they did, the Master had a new weapon in his arsenal.

 

The girl started to walk, but her feet were tangled in the sheet and she staggered.  The Master watched with a detached interest as she managed to steady herself.  “Arsing sodding thing!” She caught his expression and snarled, “You try walking about wearing a bloody sheet!”  She shook her head.  “Why’d he take my clothes, anyway?”

 

“He had to restart your heart.  After that, I’m sure he felt the need to check and make sure you didn’t do yourself any further damage.  You humans do tend to go in for the grand gesture.”  Really, after confronting an ancient evil without a shred of clothing to her name, the girl concerned herself with whether or not he could see her spine?  How very human. 

 

He turned and retrieved the Doctor’s jacket from where it lay, crumpled in a heap of brown cloth on the floor.  He then held out the article of clothing.  She gave it a suspicious look.

 

He smirked and said, “I’m a _gentleman_ villain, remember?”

 

She took the proffered article of clothing, of course.  It was either that or continue to hold up the sheet.  She turned her back on him and slipped the jacket on.  The sheet dropped to her feet, but the brown wool came down to her mid-thigh.  She did up the buttons and then turned.  She looked ludicrous, but more or less covered. 

 

“Thanks,” she muttered.

 

“It’s a jacket, and not even mine.  Don’t be effusive.”

 

“Don’t be snide,” she said.  “I don’t mean about the jacket.  And it’s hard enough to thank the baddie without running commentary, okay?”

 

He held up his hands and forced himself to remain silent.  If the human wanted to grovel, he supposed he could let her.  Perhaps fate would smile on him, and the Doctor would wake up to the sound of his human gushing all over his archenemy.  That would be delightful.  So the Master adopted an expression of polite consideration and said, “You have my undivided attention, Miss McShane.”

 

“You saved my life.”  Her tone was less than grateful, but she was at least acknowledging the fact.  “And in a roundabout way, you saved his too.  What I’m saying is, I guess this makes us equal.”

 

The Master couldn’t contain his snort of derision.  “And how, precisely, do you come to that conclusion?”

 

“Well, I beat Fenric.  It was my idea.”

 

“Yes, but you wouldn’t have had it if you were the brainless vessel of a lunatic parasite.  Try again.”

 

She walked over to a counter and picked up the small mirror he’d used to calibrate some of the deeper recesses of the mind-bender.  Then she turned and held it out to him, flat in the palm of her hand.  “Then let’s go a mirror for a mirror.”

 

He frowned.  He wanted no reminder of what he looked like in this form.  “Why would I want that?” he snarled.

 

“Believe me when I say you do,” she said.

 

He eyed her, trying to gauge intentions and motives.  Slowly, he stretched out his hand and took it, remembering vividly the mirror in the mindscape and the sight of his rotting flesh. 

 

He risked a glance.  And then he had to take another, this one longer, first searching and then incredulous.  Blue eyes looked back at him, and though his mouth hung agape in wonder, there were no fangs apparent.

 

All the signs of the virus and the toll it had taken were gone.

 

“And all our debts are paid in full,” Ace said.

 

He looked up at her, at this human girl whose mind had . . . had . . .

 

He couldn’t bring himself to thank her.  To do so would be to admit that she had done something for him, something he hadn’t been able to do for himself.  They were still, after all, talking about a complex chain of events in which all of them were an integral part.  It was just as likely that this . . . this _cleansing_ had come about by accident and the human was using a convenient set of circumstances to her advantage.  He huffed his dismissal of the very idea.  “And this makes us even?” he asked.  “You overestimate your own abilities.”

 

“You save my life, I save yours.  Yeah.  I’d say that’s even.”

 

For once, the Doctor’s timing was impeccable.  Just as the Master sensed a very awkward silence looming, the mind-bender’s hum became sporadic.  He turned to see that it was shutting down as its last mind was processed out. 

 

He stepped forward, the desire to see the job done correctly overriding his desire to let the Doctor attempt to disconnect himself from the machine.  While it would be entertaining, it could well damage him, and until he fulfilled his end of the bargain and returned the Master to his TARDIS, that was simply unacceptable.

 

He checked the Doctor’s condition—heartsbeat, pupils, respiration—and his hand moved with efficiency, even as he could tell that the grace given him by the cheetah virus was gone along with all the other, less attractive attributes.  Still, the hand was _his_, unaffected and unencumbered.  No more virus.  He had well and truly outdone death.

 

Before he could even touch the first lead, the Doctor’s eyes flew open.  His Gallifreyan reflexes were instantaneous and he was fully alert with no groggy transition.  For a second, neither moved.  They just looked at one another, assessing.  Finally, the Doctor said, “Not the face I usually expect to see when I wake up.”

 

The Master raised an eyebrow, amused in spite of himself.  For a second, the Doctor smirked at him and he smirked back, and their centuries-long battle was put aside.  For a second, Theta and he were the closest of friends.  Inseparable.  Unstoppable.

 

But time would not be denied, and the second was over in a flash.  The Master straightened and schooled his features back into a mask of neutrality as he said, “Rest assured, my dear Doctor, that I will attempt to never let it happen again.”

 

The Doctor gave him a small nod, acknowledging what had happened.  “Are you all right?” he asked.  “Fenric did you no small damage.”  And then his eyes widened and he obviously understood what he was seeing.  “The virus,” he said.

 

“Gone.” 

 

The Doctor nodded, their eyes locking as an understanding was reached.  The Master had been out of the game, trapped in a different battle, but that time was over.  They were ready to start their game anew.  The Doctor’s eyes glittered at the challenge, and the Master anticipated that this could well be the start of something immensely diverting.

 

And then the Doctor turned away from the Master, his attention refocused on the girl.  “And you, Ace?  How are you?”

 

If she was startled by how suddenly he’d addressed her, she didn’t show it.  “De-cheetahfied and de-Fenrified.  I feel light as air.”

 

He smiled and nodded, relief clear in his expression.

 

“So,” the girl said.  “He’s fine.  I’m fine.  That just leaves you.  And maybe John-boy.”

 

“Who’s John-boy?” the Doctor asked.

 

She grinned.  “Tell you later,” she said, and it was like a joke to which the Master wasn’t privy.  “Seriously, you okay?”

 

He reached up and fingered the leads attached to his head.  “I seem to be attached to a coat rack,” he said.

 

“Noticed that.”

 

He fumbled to detach his leads, but the Master batted his hand away and took over, muttering, “The last thing I need is for you to damage your brain and trap us in the vortex.”

 

“Can’t have that,” the Doctor agreed, that smile still playing around his lips. 

 

The Master detached the last lead, and checked the Doctor over again.  His heartsbeat was a little fast, but steady.  His respiration was deepening, and his eyes . . .  “Your pupils are dilated,” he said. 

 

“Give my mind a few seconds to cool down before you look to announce my imminent death,” the Doctor grumbled.  He took several deep breaths and then rose on enviably steady legs.  When he looked up at the Master again, his eyes were flat and he was all business.  “Side-effects of the machine?” he asked.

 

“Your human threw up, but nothing else.  We’ll have to wait a bit longer if we want to determine long-term effects.”  The Master, content that the Doctor wasn’t going to die and spend needless hours regenerating, moved back to the machine.  He checked the biotubing, first one strand, then a whole handful.  “All the biotubing is completely corrupted.  After a single session, there’s not a strand that isn’t showing some signs of discoloration.”

 

The Doctor nodded.  “Small wonder.  It was designed to mediate interactions between three minds and a virus.  Fenric upset the balance.”

 

The Master agreed with the Doctor’s assessment, although he wouldn’t admit it.  They were lucky that the mind-bender had held together throughout the entire ordeal, as cobbled-together as it was.  A testament to his engineering abilities, he supposed.

 

There was a rustle of fabric.  The Master turned in time to see the girl cross her arms over her chest and look deliberately away.  She was troubled, but the Master didn’t know precisely by what.  He glanced over at the Doctor to see that he had been similarly distracted by the girl’s reaction.

 

“Ace?” the Doctor ventured.

 

She glanced up at him and heaved a sigh.  “What’s this, then?  ‘Understatement of the Year’ competition?”

 

“I’m not—”

 

“Fenric upset the balance?  Yeah, that’s one way of putting it.”

 

The Doctor shifted awkwardly and said, “I was referring to mechanics.”

 

The girl breathed, hard and harsh, and then snapped, “Yeah, well, so was I.”

 

The Doctor glanced at the floor, uncertainty writ upon his features.  It was as though some line were being drawn in the space between them, and the Master wasn’t allowed to see any of the workings which led up to it.  It rankled.  What irritated him even more was the realization that he was intrigued.  But he did know that something had happened in the mindscape.  Something which had rattled this human woman even more than the theft of her mind.  The Master attempted to divine what that something might have been, but things were too murky.

 

The Doctor, too, was giving his human a covert, searching look, but he wiped it from his face when he noticed the Master’s eyes on him.  The Doctor turned to him, smiled blandly, and said, “Would you like to go now?”

 

The Master was suspicious by nature, and the ease with which this was happening set him on edge.  He frowned.  “What,” he asked, “just like that?”

 

“You fulfilled your end of the bargain.  It’s only fair that I fulfill mine.”  There was something more behind the words, something that spoke of regret.

 

And the Master understood.  The Doctor had never expected him to go as far as he had.  The plan had been concocted in a second of mental contact.  There had been general ideas, but nothing more.  The Doctor had to reach his companion without Fenric seeing.  The only way either of them could think of succeeding was through a distraction.

 

Which the Master had provided.  What he hadn’t expected was Fenric’s retaliation.  Throughout his many lives, he was always focused on the avoidance of death.  Outrunning the all-consuming dark.  Yet, in that moment, something in him had accepted it.  He had been willing to die for the Doctor.

 

He couldn’t understand it now.  Neither of them could, apparently.  Perhaps there had been some sort of lingering connection after their mental contact on the mountain.  Perhaps the unreality of the situation had simply driven him a bit mad.  Whichever it was, the Master knew that as he had lain dying, that ancient part of him which had found a bittersweet kinship in a bookish temporal theorist had silently rejoiced.

 

It was dead now, that part of him.  He was almost certain.  Thank the Guardians it was dead. 

 

He turned on his heel and retrieved his jacket from where it lay, folded on a counter next to his cape.  He pulled both on and buttoned them.  When he turned, the Doctor gave him a nod and left the room.

 

They filed through the halls of the Doctor’s TARDIS.  The Doctor’s human slipped away somewhere along the line, presumably to put on something a bit more substantial than a jacket.  The two Time Lords arrived in the control room, and the Doctor’s fingers flew over his console.

 

Soon, the time rotor began to rise and fall and the ancient (and horribly unkempt) engines wheezed into life.  With the grinding ululation particular to the Type-40 capsule, they slipped out of the vortex and back into the universe.

 

The viewscreen came alive, and there, just as he had left them, were the crystals.  He could see the crushed patches where he’d fallen, and the path through which the Doctor had dragged him.  Everything was resetting to zero.

 

He drew his cape about himself with nervous fingers.  The external doors of the TARDIS glided open and he was hit by the smell of an alien atmosphere, sharp and metallic. 

 

The Doctor didn’t move from where he stood, his eyes fixed on his machine.  “Go on, then, if you’re going,” he said.

 

And there it was, that invitation.  After what had happened, after those last moments where they’d given themselves over to the gestalt and had collapsed into one another, the Doctor believed he could save the Master. 

 

The hypocrite.

 

“Doctor,” he said, staring out onto a crystalline world and already beginning to formulate ways to destroy this man, his nemesis.  “The next time I see you, I’m going to kill you.”

 

And the Doctor’s smile was an understanding.  “You’ll try.”

 

The Master smirked and swept out of the TARDIS.  He heard the door close behind him and the shriek of the engines as it departed. 

 

He lifted his head and looked at the stars.  Millions of them, and so many inhabited.  Infinite possibilities stretched out before him, and he had only to punch in coordinates.  Somewhere crowded, he thought, somewhere with pliant minds in need of his direction.

 

He strode toward his TARDIS, his cape catching and flapping in the breeze, and the mathematical perfection of the crystals shattered under his feet.


	12. Something like Equals

He found her in the mountains.  Ace had always wondered why they had a mountain range in the middle of the TARDIS, but figured it was just one of those oddities she learned to live with.  Now she got it.  Sometimes things needed solitude.  She sat on a smooth boulder and wondered if perhaps it had been worn down by other occupants before her.  She sat on the summit of the mountain and looked out over the range that rose into the distance like crooked teeth.  It felt like she was only person in the world, in this projected or created or whatever-it-was landscape of snow and rock.  There was nothing but her and her thoughts.

 

 

And the Doctor, because he found her.  He always found her.   The snow crunched as he settled down next to her, not too close but not too far either.  A comfortable distance.  He peered off at the horizon.

 

“I don’t come here nearly as much as I should,” he said.

 

“I like it here,” she said.  “It’s lonely, but a nice sort of lonely.”  She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Oi!  Anyone out there?  Can you hear me?”  No response but the echoes of her own words bouncing back to her.  She shrugged and gestured out at the mountains.  “See?  All that space, and only one tiny speck of life.  And it’s me.  Sitting on top of a mountain.”

 

He made to rise.  “If you’d rather I—”

 

“Stay.  Please.”

 

He sat back down.

 

Ace stole a glance at him out of the corner of her eye and she remembered a desert.  She remembered a fake Doctor who made her forget what was real.  She remembered trusting him in a way she’d not been able to since she was a kid.  She remembered loving him.  She focused back out on the mountains.  All those things she’d felt, no matter how good and how right they’d seemed at the time, were lies.  Mostly.

 

She suppressed the urge to shake her head.  Since when had things got so complicated?  Fenric had upset the balance, all right: her balance, the balance established between the Doctor and her, everything was shaken up, and Ace was left scrabbling through the rubble for some semblance of sense. 

 

The Doctor must have noticed, because the next time she stole a glance at him, he was glancing back, his expression full of concern.  Not the fake, overly emotive concern Fenric had shown her, but real concern: caring but in that somewhat reserved way he had.  “Are you all right?” he asked.

 

She summoned a smile.  “Oh,” she said, “I’m ace.”

 

He turned to face her fully.  “Let’s try this again, hmm?” he said, the concern still there, but a hint of confrontation creeping into his tone.  “Are you all right?”

 

She wasn’t even sure she wanted to talk about this yet, but the memories had been triggered by his presence.  She recalled more than the fake Doctor.  She remembered the real one, pinned against the wall by her own hands, yellow cubes scattered about them.

 

Ace looked down at her hands and frowned at them.  There was something she had to say, something that seemed like a good place to start, but when she drew breath to give voice to the thought, she found herself swallowing air.  It took a moment to compose herself.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “Really, I tried to . . . I should have protected you.  And I didn’t.”  The events in the medbay flashed through her mind like quicksilver.  “At the time, it . . . I was so sure I was doing the right thing.”

 

“You’re talking about the overdose,” the Doctor said.

 

“Yes!”  She bit her lip and made a small, frustrated gesture.  “The Master said you needed to jump-start my heart.”

 

“I did.”

 

“And I’m sorry about that.”

 

“You were worried that you would hurt me,” the Doctor said, his tone neutral.  He was waiting for her to say all before he weighed in.

 

“I was terrified of it.”

 

“And it was easier to run from me than to trust me to help you?”

 

Ace laughed, but the sound was harsh.  “Trust?” she asked.  “Maybe if I’d told you about the dreams before the food machine went haywire . . .”

 

There was a pause, and Ace saw the Doctor give a slow blink out of the corner of her eyes.  “Dreams?” he asked.

 

She sighed.  Here she went.  “Yeah.  Of the cheetah virus—as the cat.  It was wandering around the TARDIS.  It was weird, but I didn’t think much about it.  Then I started seeing it when I was awake.  I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.  I’d follow it for hours, until I collapsed.  I’d wake up later and my teeth would be . . . you know.”

 

“How long did this go on?” the Doctor asked.  “Why didn’t you—”

 

“Months,” Ace snapped.  Her temper was shorter than she would have liked.  “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you!  I had a thousand reasons, and all of them seem kind of stupid now.  I wanted to protect you.  I wanted to be independent.  I was scared that if you saw what I was turning into you’d, I dunno, write me off and dump me somewhere.”

 

His neutral expression had shattered.  “You can’t honestly believe I’d do that.”

 

“Right now, I’m not sure what I believe.”

 

“All right, then.  Let’s try this.  Next time you’re in trouble, next time you think something is happening to you, something which might put either of us in danger, will you trust me to help you?”

 

It wasn’t as easy a question as it seemed.  After all, she wasn’t sure if trusting him to help was the right thing to do.  After Fenric, trusting anyone, especially the people with all the cards, was a tricky proposition.  She always seemed to be playing into the hands of one genius or another; the big bads and the big goods alike.  While she’d faced down Fenric, she’d called herself the White Queen, but she still had her doubts.  After all, up until the endgame, what had she been but just another pawn?  Was that all she was in the end?  Was that how the Doctor saw her?

 

She couldn’t ask.  She didn’t want to know that answer.

 

“Next time,” she finally said, “I’ll make the call that seems right.  I think I need you to trust _me_ to do that.”

 

Ace looked at the Doctor, and he was nodding slowly.  It was better than she’d expected.  Normally he’d start scowling when he didn’t get his way.  It was becoming clear to her how important—how _new_—the tone of this conversation was.

 

He ventured, “And with the benefit of your recent experiences?  You said that you should have told me about your dreams sooner.  Will that factor into ‘next time’?”

 

“It will.”

 

“And do you trust me?”

 

Well that was the crux of everything, wasn’t it?

 

She had to explain.  She had to at least try to let him know why this was so hard for her.  “Fenric . . . it tricked me,” she said.  “It was inside my head, I never even noticed, and it tricked me into luring you in there too.  It tricked me into nearly letting it kill you.  All those tricks, and I didn’t catch on once.  I didn’t ever beat it, and if I had been alone—if you and, God help me, the Master hadn’t have been there—Fenric would have taken my body and it would have destroyed the universe.  And all of it, every last bit, would have been my fault.  Because I stepped right into its trap.”  She looked at him, pleading with her eyes for him to understand.  “I want to trust you.  I want to trust _us_, but I’m having trouble trusting much of anything right now.”

 

The Doctor took her hands in his and looked her directly in the eyes.  “You weren’t the only person Fenric tricked, Ace.  It’s older than time, and so much more cunning than I’d ever thought.  If this mess is anyone’s fault, it’s mine.  I thought that by killing the main mass I killed Fenric, but it was right: I thought too linearly.” 

 

“No,” she said.

 

“What?”

 

“No, you don’t take the blame for this.  Fenric was in me.  It was mine.”  She shook her head, and her hair fluttered in her face.  “It said that it was every cruel word I’d ever said, every terrible thought.  It was like it was more than just a living thing.  Fenric is . . . it’s a concept.  A living idea.  The thought that anyone—even you—could have predicted what something like that would do . . . nah, I don’t buy it.  I’ve got faith in you, I think you know that.  But I’m not sure I think you’re some kind of god.”  She tempered her comment with a smirk.

 

Fortunately, the Doctor saw the funny side.  “Not even close,” he said.  “So, Fenric is—was a living thought.  I’ll believe that.  But what about the cruel thoughts and terrible deeds?”

 

Ace considered.  _Did_ she think that?  She was pretty sure it was what Fenric had wanted her to think.  Which made her wary, because Fenric was nothing if not a liar.  She was frowning with the effort of analysis.  If it was all the terrible things she’d done, she would probably be a much better person without its influence.  Then again, without all those things, what was left?  She was less of a person if she didn’t have cruel words and terrible thoughts.

 

“No, I don’t believe that,” she said.  “It’s a living idea, yeah, but it’s not that all-encompassing, you know?  It could influence me, but it had to snuff out my mind before it could control me.  So the idea of it being all the negative things about me, that’s wrong.  They’re mine.  They’re me.  Fenric doesn’t get the bad parts of me any more than it gets the good.”

 

The Doctor’s hand brushed her arm.  The gesture conjured other brushed touches.  Around her, icy peaks turned to arid desert, and she felt a thrill rush through her body, part resentment and fear, part need.  The memories had disconcerted her, and she pushed them away violently.  It was all just another one of Fenric’s games.  Unimportant, because the man who’d provoked those feelings hadn’t really been the Doctor.  It hadn’t been real.

 

She was sure it hadn’t been real, even if she could still feel . . .

 

No.  Ace shook as she released her breath and returned to reality.  There were implications there she couldn’t confront.  Not right now and maybe not ever.  Their friendship was the important thing.  Anything else was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. 

 

She turned to the Doctor and he was smiling at her gently.  He said, “We all own our terrible deeds.”

 

She remembered what they had been talking about and she saw where this was headed.  “Professor—” she started to say, but it was his turn to cut her off.

 

“Ace, there are things about me I never wanted you to see, and I’m aware that I don’t always succeed.  The first time we met Fenric, the confrontation with Lady Peinforte . . . if I could, I would have kept you away from all that.”

 

“You needed me there,” she said.

 

“I did.  You were a critical part of the plan both times.”

 

And both times she’d felt horribly betrayed that he hadn’t trusted her enough to let her in on the plan, or at least let her know that all her fears and pain weren’t necessary.  God, he could hurt her when he had a mind to.  Even more than Fenric could.  “So,” she said, “you manipulated me into doing what you needed me to.”  She couldn’t help it.  Her fears of being his pawn were back, and she heard herself say, “I’m starting to get the feeling that everyone’s pulling my strings.”

 

“I’m sorry, Ace,” he said.  “If I could do it all again—”

 

“You’d do everything the same.”

 

The guilty look on his face told her she was right.  When he ventured to speak again, the words were soft, almost pleading.  “I was wrong,” he said.  “I learned that in the mindscape.”  He reached over and, with an air of hesitation, tapped her nose.  “You’re nobody’s pawn.  Not Fenric's, and certainly not mine.”

 

She gave a smile just as hesitant as his tap.  “Does that mean you’re going to let me in on your plans?” she asked.  What it sounded like he was offering was a different sort of relationship.  Not that of a mentor and student, but partners.  Something like equals.

 

He returned the smile.  “I’ll tell you one right now, if you’d like.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I’m feeling a bit chilly,” he said, “and I have a plan that involves tea for two.”

 

“Tea for two sounds . . . pretty much perfect, Professor,” Ace said.  “Do we drink it here, or somewhere else?”

 

“I was thinking more along the lines of the study.  We could bring it back here, but it might get cold.”

 

“And you can’t drink cold tea on top of a mountain.”

 

“Perish the thought.”

 

He leaped to his feet with his usual flair.  She rose, too, stretching out the stiffness the cold had caused.  He offered an arm and she took it.  Then she reconsidered, slipping her arm out and taking his hand, instead.  He gave her a curious look and she gave him a smile.  Something like equals, she thought.

 

And as she did, something occurred to her.  It wasn’t the right time to say it—not when they’d mended so much between them—but she felt that it needed to be said.  He needed to understand, because he blamed himself for the terrible things he did.  And maybe she blamed him a little too.  Especially when the terrible things he did were to her.  But he needed to know that, as angry as she got, she also understood.  She’d tried to tell him in the mindscape, but she didn’t think he’d believed her then. 

 

“I’ve always known,” she said, her tone low and serious as they stood on top of a mountain and she looked at his hand in hers.  “About the things you do, I mean.  Ever since Skaro, I’ve known.”

 

His guilt was back.  He tried to pull his hand away, but she wouldn’t let go.  “I’m sorry,” he said.

 

“I’m not,” she said.  They looked at each other.  “As mad as I get when you don’t tell me what’s going on . . . when I get hurt in pursuit of the greater good . . . you’re the man who does what has to be done.  Regardless of the cost.  To your friends and to yourself.  And I’m proud of you, ‘cause that’s an awful job and you do it.”

 

“You shouldn’t be.”

 

“Too bad.  I am.”

 

Something told her that nothing she ever said was going to erase his self-directed hate, but she was Ace.  She did the impossible all the time.  And if she was his partner now, it was her job to make sure that he understood she was behind him no matter what.  They were a team.

 

He turned to go and she caught him, arms around his middle.  It was an awkward hug as hugs went, but it was real and solid.  He wouldn’t be able to mistake her intent.

 

He seemed to start for a moment, but she refused to give him too much time to ponder the imponderables about the situation.  She rested her chin on his shoulder.  “Did you know that most of the human brain is never used?” she asked.  “You have to wonder if I’m going to be different now that Fenric and the cheetah virus and God only knows what else were having a party in that—what?—ninety-two percent?  I mean, now that it’s got some exercise, do you think it’ll expect more?”

 

He chuckled.  “You might actually learn TARDIS repair after all.”

 

“Maybe I’ll learn how to fly her.”

 

She looked up and saw him in profile.  He lifted an eyebrow and smirked.  “Fine.  Maybe I can finally retire.”

 

“You could take up golf,” she teased.  “You’ve got the trousers.”

 

His smirk faded.  “Just because I recently witnessed you defeat an evil older than time itself doesn’t give you the right to insult my sartorial elegance.”

 

“Defeating Fenric might not give me that right, but having to look at that pullover every day does.”

 

The Doctor glanced down, and Ace did the same.  The woolen in question was barely holding together.  It was a mass of burn holes.

 

“I’m going to need a new one,” he said, his tone mournful.

 

“You know,” Ace said, “that paisley waistcoat that matches your hanky looks very dashing.”

 

“You said it looked like it had been run up from some curtains.”

 

“Very dashing curtains,” she said.

 

“You like the waistcoat better than the pullover.”

 

“Could be said.”

 

The Doctor sighed.  “She wants to fly my ship and choose my clothes,” he announced to the mountain range in general.

 

Ace chuckled and the conversation died off.  It wasn’t awkward, though.  It was nice not to feel compelled to speak.  In spite of the Doctor’s indignation, he still had his arms around her.  Their breath fell into a rhythm and she leaned into him. 

 

And that was the difference, really, between the Doctor and Fenric.  They both held her, but with Fenric it was all about possession, about luring her into something, but this . . . the Doctor was . . .

 

“Comfortable?” he asked.  Maybe he’d read her mind.  Maybe it was just an innocent question.  No real way to tell with him.

 

“Actually, yes I am,” she said into his shoulder.

 

“Splendid.  We could, however, be even more comfortable in the study.  And I really would like that cup of tea.”

 

And she laughed.  It was a clear sound, and it bounced and reverberated throughout the mountains.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Yeah, let’s go get some tea.  I’m parched.  All that desert trekking.”

 

He snorted and she moved around to his side, leaving one arm around his waist.  He slung his arm around her shoulder.  “You didn’t have to wade through a dust storm.”  His voice was a pleasant rumble barely heard over the wind.  “If ever I needed a good cup of tea . . .”

 

Yeah, she thought, this was how things were supposed to be: the Doctor, her, and a good pot of tea after saving the universe.  They headed down the side of the mountain towards the door to the hall.


End file.
